Indice dei contenuti per March 2023 in ELLE DECOR

ELLE DECOR|March 2023

THE ART ISSUE

This issue, ELLE DECOR’s annual love letter to living and decorating with art, is also a celebration of architecture and interiors that are masterworks unto themselves. Take our cover story, a 1970s residence in Venice, California, by legendary architect Frank Gehry, today stewarded by German-born creative director Florian Marquardt. Gehry’s early projects have a rugged beauty—corrugated-metal on the exterior and exposed wood framing inside give them a charmingly rough-hewn quality. But as Janelle Zara’s article (page 82) makes clear, this house is also immensely livable and comfortably accommodates contemporary furniture and a cache of beautiful abstract works. Elsewhere in these pages we feature on-the-rise artists, game-changing curatorial talent, must-see exhibitions, and our favorite new shoppable objects for the home. I’m especially excited for readers to dive into this month’s Point…

1 min

ELLE DECOR|March 2023

OFF THE WALLS

VISIT ROME Since 1803, the Villa Medici, a Renaissance palace, has been home to the French Academy in Rome. Now Fendi artistic director Kim Jones and the brand’s architecture department have teamed up to transform six of the villa’s historic salons. Newly restored and open to the public, the rooms feature fresh palettes, Fendi Casa furniture, and pieces by designers such as Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance, Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, and Toan Nguyen. villamedici.it SEE NEW YORK CITY Boasting the largest collection of Spanish and Portuguese art outside the Iberian Peninsula, the Hispanic Society Museum & Library reopens its main building and upper terrace in Washington Heights this month after a six-year renovation by Selldorf Architects and Beyer Blinder Belle. The restoration includes a refresh of the Spanish Renaissance–style Main Court, with…

3 min

ELLE DECOR|March 2023

ROOM TO RISE

WHEN THE 29-YEAR-OLD BRONX-BASED ARTIST CHEYENNE JULIEN was three, she covered the walls of her family’s apartment with scribbles. But unlike most toddlers, she was rewarded for her defacements with a wall on which she could express herself with impunity. After she’d covered every inch, a new coat of paint went up—a tabula rasa to continue working her creative muscles. Now, those same images and the spaces they decorated appear in the background of her paintings and drawings. “I see life as a cartoon,” Julien says. “My mind can be a very dark, jumbled place, so a lot of that comes through humorously in the work.” Creating is a way for Julien to examine herself, organize her thoughts, and exorcise traumatic events. “The work comes from my anxiety,” she says.…

2 min

ELLE DECOR|March 2023

FRANKLY ICONIC

When, in the late 1970s, a young Los Angeles filmmaker named Jane Spiller commissioned Frank Gehry to design her home in Venice, California, it was an early but groundbreaking period of Gehry’s career. He was taking the kinds of inexpensive, workmanlike materials ideally suited to Spiller’s limited budget and constructing homes distinguished by sculptural, exaggerated geometries. “Jane Spiller was one of our greatest clients,” he recalled in the 2009 book Frank Gehry: The Houses (Rizzoli). “She wanted us to do our stuff.” The completed Spiller House, half a block from the Venice Beach boardwalk, is a pair of boxlike units, one designed for the owner to live in and the other to host tenants. Within an unassuming facade of unpainted corrugated-metal sheets, the virtually unchanged interior architecture still brims with…

4 min

ELLE DECOR|March 2023

Inside the Wide World of Lari Pittman & Roy Dowell

For almost two decades, artists Lari Pittman and Roy Dowell inhabited a house in Los Angeles that was itself a work of art. Designed in 1952 by the famed architect Richard Neutra, the residence was situated on a hilltop in La Crescenta, north of Pasadena. The couple later commissioned the architect Michael Maltzan to design a second home on the property. “There was an ethos of potential and projection into the future,” says Pittman of living among great works of architecture. A few years ago, however, as they neared their 70th birthdays, the artists decided to move back to the center of Los Angeles, near their studios. “We wanted a shorter commute and more exposure to the humanity of a denser population,” Pittman says. There were other reasons, too: “Though…

4 min

ELLE DECOR|March 2023

COLIN KING

1. HOTEL SANDERS I treated myself to a vacation at this Copenhagen hotel a few years ago. It’s more eclectic than a lot of Danish design. hotelsanders.com 2. PAPER-WEIGHT My collection for Menu taps into my affinity for objects with heft, whether actual weight or a presence of form and spirit. menuspace.com 3. ARRANGING THINGS I found myself through styling, and my book challenges readers to look at their things differently. rizzoliusa.com 4. COCKTAIL NAPKINS I can’t cook, but I can make a drink. And I like to pair glassware with fun cocktail napkins. (I use mine as coasters.) rwguild.com 5. TERRA-COTTA DISHES Whether serveware or a nut bowl, I always try to pick up something unique to give as a host gift. ilbuco.com 6. THORVALDSENS MUSEUM, COPENHAGEN The scale…

1 min

ELLE DECOR|March 2023

THE MIX MAESTRO

IF RAFAEL DE CÁRDENAS IS NOT QUITE a household name, it may be because four walls can’t contain the architect and designer’s prodigious talent. His is a name often dropped at cocktail parties—shorthand for design with a global perspective and studied sensuality. Since founding his eponymous firm in 2006 in Manhattan’s Chinatown, de Cárdenas has worked his magic on everything from yachts to villas, retail boutiques, and city apartments. This spring, de Cárdenas launches his first furniture collection with a capsule line for Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams. With influences as disparate as 1940s French Art Deco and Demi Moore’s apartment in the 1985 film St. Elmo’s Fire, the collection lends itself to the idiosyncrasies of city life while appealing to this all-American, North Carolina–based brand’s loyal customer base. De…

1 min

ELLE DECOR|March 2023

FALLING INTO PLACE

You could call it kismet, the way collecting led Ilan Cohen to this apartment in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. “When I started, back in 2009, I would buy any contemporary work that I saw,” Cohen says. “But over time I created my own eye and my own taste.” Upon his discovery of the practice of queer artist TM Davy, his collection evolved, ultimately becoming fodder for a 2012 group show, co-curated with 1969 Gallery’s Quang Bao, thematically focused on The Picture of Dorian Gray. The exhibition opened on Oscar Wilde’s birthday and brought a number of new relationships with emerging talent into Cohen’s life. Creating a space that reflected this personal history—and provided ample room to nurture and expand on it—fell to Noam Dvir and Daniel Rauchwerger, founders of the architecture…

3 min

ELLE DECOR|March 2023

WITH FLYING COLORS

Picture an apartment on Manhattan’s Museum Mile and an image comes to mind: a classic six in a prewar co-op, filled with antiques, plump furniture, and blue-chip art. But when Sara Tayeb-Khalifa arrives at her home near Fifth Avenue, she enters an environment unlike her neighbors’—or anyone else’s, for that matter. Her living room’s espresso hue acts as a foil to an explosion of color—from the Vladimir Kagan sofa in an electric-blue velvet to color-blocked silk draperies in six jewel tones, from cobalt to yellow to fuchsia. The kitchen’s ceiling and walls are covered in a pattern of ripe oranges, her bedroom is done up like a fantasy garden, and art is everywhere, as are intriguing objects and scores of books that spill off surfaces. If the apartment resembles anything,…

4 min

ELLE DECOR|March 2023

A SHORE THING

Transformation is par for the course in any town, and certainly in one as historic as Provincetown, Massachusetts. What began as a 17th-century fishing village later evolved into a retreat for artists and writers and a refuge for the LGBTQ community. Today, visitors flock to this picturesque destination at the extreme tip of Cape Cod, and the town’s charming shingled homes have become highly coveted. For Terrence Meck and Bret Alberti, Provincetown has been their primary home year-round for almost a decade. The couple met 12 years ago at a flying trapeze class; Alberti was the teacher. Now he tends to their homes and life together, while Meck runs the Palette Fund—a philanthropic foundation started in honor of his late former husband. In 2018, Meck and Alberti were looking for…

4 min

ELLE DECOR|March 2023

RESOURCES

CONTENTS PAGE 24: Breakfast table: Elyse Graham, elysegraham.com. Dining chairs: Julian Chichester, us.julianchichester.com. Chairs fabric: E´litis, elitis.fr. Paint: Farrow & Ball, farrow-ball.com. Artwork: Lucas Samaras, pacegallery.com. HOUSE CALL Interior design: BoND, bureaund.com. PAGE 62: Sofa: Vipp, vipp.com. Cocktail table: Thomas Barger, salon94design.com. Side table: Artek, artek.fi. Artworks: Sam McKinniss, sammckinniss.com; Doron Langberg, doronlangberg.com; Oren Pinhassi, orenpinhassi.com. PAGE 66: Headboard fabric: Dedar, dedar.com. Shelving: Zuerlein Furniture, 347-628-8883. Kitchen: Vipp. Artworks: Wolfgang Tillmans, tillmans.co.uk; Doron Langberg; Alex Olson, altmansiegel.com; Alison Rossiter, alisonrossiter.com; Lisa Williamson, lisawilliamsonart.com. PAGE 68: Bench: Thomas Barger. Rug: Nordic Knots, nordicknots.com. Artwork: TM Davy, tmdavy.com. FRANKLY ICONIC Interior design: Florian Marquardt, flomarquardt.com. PAGES 82–83: Cocktail table: Mike Ruiz Serra, mikeruizserra.com. Rug: Nordic Knots, nordicknots.com. PAGE 84: Trousers: Issey Miyake, isseymiyake.com. Chair: Minjae Kim, minjae.kim. Artwork: Aythamy Armas, aythamyarmas.com. PAGES…

4 min

ELLE DECOR|March 2023

BUT DOES IT SPARK JOY?

One can’t get away from the phrase collectible design these days. These two deceptively simple words joined forces nearly 20 years ago and have since gained steam, spawning a contemporary design market with an increasing number of galleries offering pieces touted as collectible—and the rise of a collector class wanting to be affiliated with this much-hyped movement. Historically, collectible implied scarcity or provenance, and with vintage or antique pieces, scarcity was often a given, even if said works were originally mass-produced. But when it comes to contemporary furniture and accessories by living designers, it’s become a loaded word, implying that these pieces are worthy investments that will increase in value. But often the appreciation doesn’t occur for decades, if at all, and the secondary market for contemporary design is virtually…

4 min

ELLE DECOR|March 2023

GOOD EYE

EARLY AMERICAN STREETWEAR, PLAYTIME DESIGN, EXPERIMENTAL NATIVE American craft—all are disparate subjects that Alexandra Cunningham Cameron has contextualized and made fresh over the course of the past 15-odd years. In her current role as contemporary design curator at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, in New York, she spends her days interpreting the museum’s existing collection and expanding the canon of design through new acquisitions. Her path to the Cooper Hewitt was a nontraditional one. She came to the museum in 2018 not with a Ph.D. but from the arts publication Miami Rail, where she served as editor in chief. She had previously been the creative director of Design Miami and an independent curator of shows at contemporary art museums across the United States. During that time she threw her…

2 min

ELLE DECOR|March 2023

THE SUM OF ITS PARTS

The year was 1667, and the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in Paris had a problem: How to display the massive amount of art by École des Beaux-Arts graduates all at once? The answer lay in what was reportedly the first-ever salon wall—also known as a gallery wall—an overwhelmingly beautiful bit of controlled chaos, a riotous run-on sentence à la française of artworks, mostly pictures, hung from side to side, floor to ceiling. Fast forward 356 years and gallery walls are more popular than ever, and just as excruciating to arrange today as in the 17th century. “Sometimes people get really caught up in, well, all the mats have to be the same, or all the frames have to be the same, or whatever the case may be,”…

3 min

ELLE DECOR|March 2023

FROM HER HOUSE TO OUR HOUSE

During the pandemic lockdown, Richard Arregui spotted a dramatic modernist home for sale on Zillow in the Ponce Davis area of Miami, his hometown. “It was like looking at a work of art,” said the former art dealer turned collector, who stalked it online obsessively for weeks before the owner allowed an open house. Once inside, Richard and his wife, Susan, looked past the cluttered interior painted purple and yellow and appreciated how the fluid sculptural spaces opened to tropical greenery through glass expanses at every turn. He realized he had been there before—at a 1990 cocktail party hosted by Gloria Luria, a pioneer of Miami’s art scene who opened one of the first contemporary art galleries in the city. “It was an incredible home with incredible art by George…

5 min

ELLE DECOR|March 2023

ON CLOUD NINE

There’s been an inf lux of cloud-piercing New York City towers over the past 10 years, each staking its claim to Manhattan’s increasingly crowded skyline. One standout is the 1,050-foot-high 53 West 53, a Museum of Modern Art neighbor developed by Pontiac Land Group and Hines and executed by the Paris-based Pritzker Prize–winning architect Jean Nouvel. Its distinct diagrid facade—an exposed structural system that frames the view from every unit in the building—is further elevated by a recent addition: the ELLE DECOR Penthouse. ELLE DECOR A-List designer Joe Nahem, of Fox-Nahem Associates, based in New York, brought the space to life. Few design firms are more familiar with the magazine. “I’ve been a part of the ELLE DECOR family for probably three decades,” says Nahem, who, alongside his late business…

5 min

ELLE DECOR|March 2023

SUNNY SIDE UP

“Ernest Hemingway was a tragic figure, totally lost within his own myth. That’s what I find most interesting about him. I grew up in South Florida, near the home in Key West where he lived in the 1930s. The property is architecturally brilliant, one of the first with plumbing in the area and a huge bathroom for the time. I love the floor tiles—a mashup of clean Art Deco lines with indulgent patterning. Hemingway was a hunter and a fisherman, so some of the decor incorporates ducks and fish. It’s hypermasculine but nods to a feminine side.”…

1 min