Sommaire pour Fall 2018 de MILIEU

MAGAZINES, it turns out, are like people. They grow up fast. MILIEU has grown up fast during these past five years and we keep getting better and stronger. This issue marks our fifth anniversary and we are happy—truly joyful—to share this occasion with you. Most of the people on MILIEU’s staff have been here since the beginning. It was actually six years ago when we first started dreaming it up, putting it together, and deciding how best to proceed. We spent an entire year preparing to launch our Fall 2013 issue. Once those pages were printed, almost immediately we were noticed and read. Our readership increases with every issue and we feature more and more designers and destinations around the world. There is so much good design happening now and…

PENNER-ASH CELLARS “I am more interested in quality than quantity,” says winemaker Lynn Penner-Ash (right). As the first woman winemaker in Oregon, Penner-Ash’s devotion to excellence is obvious in the wines she creates and the winery she created. Surrounded by gorgeous gardens, the contemporary wood-and-glass structure (left), designed by the Portland architecture firm Waterleaf, crowns a hilltop between Yamhill and Newberg with full-on views of Mt. Jefferson and Mt. Adams. It’s a bit tricky to find, but well worth the effort because Penner-Ash makes some of the most highly regarded pinot noirs and syrahs in Oregon, as well as vogniers, rubeos, Rieslings, and rosés. You can peer into the glass-walled fermentation room as you sip one of the Estate pinot noirs, relax in an Adirondack chair on the lawn, or…

There’s a certain beauty in the juxtaposition of the Daniel Libeskind–designed Denver Art Museum (DAM), with its slicing, jagged angles and shiny, metallic materials, and the masterpieces of the fashion house Christian Dior, known for its curvaceous, feminine silhouettes and soft, flowing fabrics. The institution’s new exhibition, “Dior: From Paris to the World,” which debuts November 18 and runs through March 3 of 2019, further highlights the dichotomy of subject versus setting by adding another visual master to the mix: The show is designed by Shohei Shigematsu of the architectural firm OMA, known most recently for his memorable design of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Manus X Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology.” “Usually fashion exhibitions deal more with set designers in a decorative manner, but we have…

LIGHT, THE MOST ABUNDANT element of the Mediterranean coastline, is sometimes the hardest to capture. Such was the case when designers Serge Castella and Jason Flinn first walked into this full-floor penthouse apartment atop a Barcelona building to assess the project facing them. The duo, longtime life and work partners, could see through the apartment windows and from its expansive terraces the shimmering sea, distant snow-capped Pyrénées, façades by Gaudi and other Art Nouveau masters, all illuminated by the Catalonian sun, as if in bas relief. “But all was pretty dark, ironically, inside,” recounts Castella, who, with Flinn, was commissioned to design and furnish the interiors of the apartment. Though the space was surrounded by brightness and situated high up in Barcelona’s most picturesque neighborhood, no direct light streamed inside.…

“MY FAVORITE CLIENTS are the ones who know what they want,” says Atlanta-based interior designer Beth Webb, “the ones who have a great aesthetic of their own.” It’s no surprise, then, that Webb thoroughly enjoyed designing the interiors of this new spacious Buckhead townhouse for a pair of friends-turned-clients who wanted favorite artworks in their collection to drive the design of every room in the home. “She has an absolutely amazing eye,” Webb says of the wife, whom she met through mutual friends on a trip to the South of France several years ago. Like Webb herself, her client—an artist currently working mostly in pastels—is an art historian, and has been affiliated with some of the East Coast’s top galleries and museums. The husband, who retired as a CEO in…

COVER All fabric creations made by Melanie Williams. Tablecloth: Mila, Color: Orange Rust, JIM THOMPSON, jimthompsonfabrics.com. Buttons: 8 Miroirs Scarlett 36320/9115, HOULÈS, houles.com. Cake covered in Tika, Color: Nutmeg, LISA FINE TEXTILES, lisafinetextiles.com. Trims on cake from top to bottom: 1. Rose on top made from Amoret, Color: Sunstone, ZOFFANY, stylelibrary.com; Jane Churchill Solaris, Color: Bronze, COWTAN & TOUT, cowtan.com; Athena Taffeta, Color: Rosewood, STROHEIM, stroheim.com. 2. Etruscan Drop Sheen, Color: Gold, Barry Dixon for VERVAIN, vervain.com. 3. Colefax & Fowler Arlington Narrow Braid, Color: Sand, COWTAN & TOUT, cowtan.com. 4. Bohem, Color: Coral, Barry Dixon for VERVAIN, vervain.com. 5. Le Jardin Silk Tufts, Color: Copper 975-41401/33, SAMUEL & SONS, samuelandsons.com. 6. Browning, Color: Caramel Spice, VERVAIN, vervain.com. 7. Sequin Braid, T605/03, OSBORNE & LITTLE, osborneandlittle.com. 8. Double piping Cord…

Isabel López-Quesada Based in Madrid, Isabel López-Quesada says that what she does is make spaces more beautiful. She is a prolific interior designer not only in her native Spain, but also elsewhere throughout the world, including the U.S., France, and Japan. “A house, as a person, must combine tradition and modernity,” she says. Charles Spada Charles Spada studied fashion design in Paris. In 1980, he moved on from fashion to focus on Charles Spada Interiors and working as an art director making TV commercials and made-for-TV films. In addition to interior design, he is owner of the Charles Spada Showroom at the Boston Design Center. Serge Castella Working in consort with his life/work partner, Jason Flinn, Serge Castella is known as an interior designer, product designer, and antiques dealer. Castella…

It’s easy to step into India Madhavi’s world. Three gallery/showroom/studio spaces, which display her latest designs, colonize rue Las Cas at #3, #5, #19 in Paris’s aristocratic 7th arrondisement. She is not only a brilliant and prolific Paris-based designer, she’s also a phenomenon, known for the chic interiors she creates for hotels and restaurants, as well as for ravishing private residences in locales as varied as Connecticut to California, London to the Riviera, and for furniture designs that include cool, contemporary drawing room sofas, notably the Bluffer, and velvet-covered iconic chairs such as the Gelato. “One of my signatures is a structural sofa covered with a soft velvet, itself a signature,” she says. Madhavi’s imaginative bathroom fixtures for Bisazza, christened with comic book exclamations, include a “plouf” tub, a “splash”…

A FAVORITE CHILDHOOD MEMORY FROM ENGLAND? Christmas at Broadlands was very traditional. A huge tree cut from the estate would be towering in the marble hallway. As children, we would hang up our stockings waiting to be filled, the biggest and therefore most popular stockings happened to be my grandfather’s shooting socks. MOST POWERFUL WOMEN OF THE PRESENT? Being a prime minister always brings considerable power so, of course, Theresa May, but I would rate, Michelle Obama and Christine Lagarde prettily highly. YOUR BUSINESS EMPOWERS WOMEN AROUND THE WORLD. WHO IS A POWERFUL WOMAN OF THE PAST? Florence Nightingale, who changed lives for the better. Up until the Napoleonic Wars, absolutely nothing was done for the wounded. They were left to die on the battlefields. In the Crimean war, Florence…

I first came to Patmos as a young bride. I was a pale English Rose, more suited to a shade-dappled croquet lawn than the piercing island light of the Dodecanese. My new husband was Italian and I was a little disappointed to be spending my first summer as a married woman in Greece rather than his native Sicily. He had holidayed in Patmos since he was a child but I didn’t think that it would be for me. I disliked sunbathing and was unused to boats, so when we arrived that night in August at the star-lit port of Skala after plowing through the Aegean for ten long hours in a broken-down ferry from Piraeus, I had little inkling that I would fall in love for the second time that…

Most interior designers claim that travel is their best source of inspiration. When Barry Dixon appeared on May 30 in the Vervain showroom in New York’s D&D building, he told the assembled crowd of admirers about his boyhood life in places as disparate as Korea and South Africa and the American South. And when the guests saw the array of new fabrics and trims he has designed for Vervain—prints, embroideries, silks, velvets—the scope of his experiences abroad become fully evident. MILIEU’s Design Director, Leslie Newsom Rascoe, graciously introduced Barry Dixon and conducted a Q&A with him. He then led the audience on a visual tour of his 1907 house in Virginia, a grand Edwardian-style residence set on three hundred acres. MILIEU has featured Barry’s designs in our pages and we…

I LOVE MY HOUSE, but when I first visited, I didn’t love it. In fairness, my immediate reaction was not to the nondescript rooms in the typical modern New England Colonial. It was to the odor of wet wood that came from the fireplace where the damper had been left open and the rain poured in. The odor permeated the house so strongly that I made a dash for the door. Bewildered, the sales agent followed. We drove a block away and I realized I was making a mistake. I asked him to turn around. I wanted to see the house again. An offer followed on the spot. Even in its sorry state, with its vanilla rooms, I knew it was the right house for the next phase of my…

WHAT IS THE secret weapon in the arsenal of a successful designer? The innate “eye”. Turin-born, London-based Italian designer Allegra Hicks’s “eye” was introduced into a world of contemporary design from childhood. “Our house in Turin wasn’t like my friends’ houses,” she observes. Her family home was glass, commissioned by her architecture-aficionado father after a model of a Frank Lloyd Wright design. Her mother supervised the home’s modernist interiors, featuring furniture from Gio Ponti and Franco Albini and embraced details right down to the contemporary cutlery on the dining table. Now, renowned for her luxury lifestyle textiles, rugs, and imaginative private commissions, Hicks has put that eye to work in Italy reinventing a long-abandoned family property in Naples into a second professional and private base for herself and her husband,…