Photo by Eric Piasecki/Architectural Digest
This year shelter magazines tilled their terrain with many many a designer home—and why wouldn’t they? Parading the over-the-top digs of aesthetes whose entire lives drip with the glamour and point of view that made them gazillionaires is fascinating. More to the point, as much as any human’s habitat reflects his or her personal style, designers use their home to cloy the senses with their signature ballsiness—be it Ralph Lauren’s red, white, and blue tartan, Jonathan Adler’s pillows embroidered with with 1960s bouffant hairdos, or Orla Kiely’s groovy, ’70s inspired prints. These highlights (and so much more) below.
Photos by Roger Davies/Architectural Digest↑ Waldo Fernandez in Beverly Hills. Fernandez, a prolific Cuban-born interior designer, not only boasts Elizabeth Taylor, Jennifer Aniston, Sean Connery, and the Pitt-Jolie clan as clients, but also a SoCal a midcentury spread lacquered to a high shine and laced with contemporary art. After replacing the pool and adding a second-story bedroom suite, Fernandez called upon what Arch Digest calls his “perfectionist disposition” for the interiors, bringing in wenge-wood flooring, large doors “finished in exactly 17 coats of deep brown–black lacquer,” and a collection of carefully curated art and furniture. “I’m obsessed with keeping the house fresh,” he told AD. [link]
Photos by William Waldron/Architectural Digest↑ Jamie Drake in NYC. After spending years waiting for his two-bedroom unit in NYC’s Annabelle Selldorf-designed 200 Eleventh Avenue condo building to be finished—”it taunts me,” he said about the work-in-process in ’09—Drake, a big-name famed for his use of high-octane color, finally settled into his 3,000-square-foot apartment last year. Unsurprisingly, he took little time to swath it in the go-to garb—punches of bright hues, assertive art—that’s ensnared clients like Madonna and (outgoing) New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The home is also stuffed with pieces Drake designed, including the living room’s marble-and-granite table and his bed and headboard. [link]
↑ Howard Slatkin in NYC. In October, interior designer Howard Slatkin, who’s made a living off a layered more-is-more approach to florals, chintz, gilding, tassels, and chair skirts, released a monster tome all about a single 6,000-square-foot New York City apartment: his. Frustrated by the penchant of shelter magazines to breeze over the private, and possibly the most interesting, areas of a home—the pantries, the linen closets, the crowded, computer-topped desks—Slatkin opened up every cranny of his pad: the elevator vestibule, the back hall, the laundry area, and, duh, the “flower room” and “candle room.” For any other apartment, an editorial dive this deep would be silly, but for an apartment overflowing with ivory objets, curtains made of “17th-century Portuguese polychrome embroidered bedcovers,” French Chantilly plates, and—oh my—mahogany doors “embellished with Japanese lacquer panels inset in gild-wood frames, which are bordered with patinated mirrors,” 240 pages is really the only way to go. [link]