Indice dei contenuti per September 2023 in ELLE DECOR

ELLE DECOR|September 2023

THE STYLE ISSUE

OUR COVER STORY THIS MONTH BEGAN, AS SO MANY THINGS DO these days, with a slide into the DMs. When U.S. Women’s National Team soccer superstar Megan Rapinoe and her wife, former WNBA guard Sue Bird, purchased a Manhattan apartment and found themselves in need of an interior designer, they tapped Mark Grattan for the job with a message that included an earnest call for “HALP!” What Grattan delivered is the same finesse that landed his own Mexico City apartment on the cover of this magazine in April 2021: a home that is as cool and well edited as it is livable, full of clever color combinations and sumptuous textures. It’s a testament to Grattan’s skill that Rapinoe and Bird’s aerie feels like a distillation and heightening of their tastes.…

1 min

ELLE DECOR|September 2023

Seeing the Light

Recently, I bought an apartment that will require a complete renovation. Nothing fancy, though it won’t be cheap, and as with such endeavors, I’ve found it’s become an all-consuming project. For instance, I am now fixated on acquiring a vintage Uchiwa pendant lamp made by the midcentury German industrial designer Ingo Maurer. Crafted from bamboo fans, fabric, and paper and resembling the open petals of an anemone flower, the lamp is a beautiful relic of the 1970s. Maurer was called “the poet of light,” and his command of it deserves reverence. Partly because his Uchiwa lamps have not been produced since 1984 and partly because of the frailty of their materials, they are expensive. According to the Parisian dealer I’ve been emailing with, the lamp I want costs more than…

4 min

ELLE DECOR|September 2023

Game hanger

In 2021, Sue Bird and Megan Rapinoe, one of the most decorated power couples in sports, found themselves in pursuit of a new kind of ornamentation: the interior design of their first home purchased together. For the former WNBA guard and the reigning U.S. Women’s National Team champion, the winning tip came from Rapinoe’s stylist, Karla Welch, who put her on to ELLE DECOR A-List designer Mark Grattan. Rapinoe slid humbly into Grattan’s Instagram DMs: “My fiancée and I just got a place in SoHo and need HALP!” The place in question was a 1,650-square-foot, two-bedroom pied-à-terre with high ceilings, sweeping views onto the city, and a rooftop terrace to boot. “New York is a really special place to both of us,” Rapinoe says. “Sue is from here. It feels…

5 min

ELLE DECOR|September 2023

Neutral Party

During that strange and surreal pandemic spring of 2020, Simon Huck and Phil Riportella needed to move. The reason will be familiar to many couples who suddenly found themselves working at home during that time: Zoom. “We moved because of his Zoom voice,” says Huck, a quippy public relations and marketing guru who famously works with the Kardashians and is a familiar presence on their TV show and social media feeds. From across the room, Riportella, cofounder of the fragrance and candle line Snif, issues a protest and then laughs. “I am loud,” he admits. The gregarious couple met seven years ago on Tinder and were married last November at the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles in front of a guest list filled with names like Chrissy Teigen, Hailey Bieber,…

5 min

ELLE DECOR|September 2023

RESOURCES

Items pictured but not listed are from private collections. COVER Top: Bode, bode.com. Pants: Lemaire, us.lemaire.fr. Shoes: Nike x Comme des Garçons, nike.com. Top: Harago, @harago_. Pants: Balenciaga, balenciaga.com. Shoes: Maison Margiela, maison margiela.com. TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE 24: Wallcovering: De Gournay, degournay.com. PAGE 28: Fixture: Spark Lighting, sparklights.com. GAME CHANGER Interior design: Mark Grattan, @markgrattan. PAGE 74: Wallcovering: Élitis, elitis.fr. Artwork: Xavier Kelley, xray-visions.com. PAGE 75: Sofa fabric: Dedar, dedar.com. Sofa leather: Milton Sokol, miltonsokol.com. Rug: Hechizoo Textiles, hechizoo.com. PAGE 77: Barstools: Cassina, cassina.com. Tiles: Mutina, mutina.it. Fittings: Kohler, kohler.com. PAGE 78: Sofa fabric: Dedar. Rug: R & Company, r-and-company.com. Vessel: Nur Ceramics, nurceramics.com. PAGE 79: Wallcovering: Élitis. Fittings: Studio Piet Boon, pietboon.com. Mirror: Fenestella, fenestellany.com. Paint: Benjamin Moore, benjaminmoore.com. Artwork: Xavier Kelley. Rug: R & Company. PAGE 80:…

3 min

ELLE DECOR|September 2023

ALL AGLOW

Crowning Glory Time to cast some light on the subject! The newest pendants and chandeliers do more than just illuminate a foyer or salon: Sculptural, elegant pieces also add a welcome dose of statement-making style to your home. Snap up any of these glamorous options for a truly electric design scheme. —H.M.…

1 min

ELLE DECOR|September 2023

FOLLOWING THE THREAD

WITH THE HEELED-BOOT GAIT OF AN INDIE rocker and a perfectly imperfect mane of black hair tumbling past his shoulders, Bengt Thornefors seems an unlikely champion of upholstery-weight textiles. But looks, as everyone knows, can be deceiving. When the entrepreneurial Swede was appointed creative director, in 2022, of the nearly-200-year-old textile brand Sahco, he was tasked with mining the tension between past and present to create collections worthy of a true textile maison. As cofounder of the bedware brand Magniberg—which, like Sahco, is now owned by Kvadrat—Thornefors brings with him decades of expertise in the fashion industry, working early on in his career under Acne Studios cofounder Jonny Johansson and later making his way to Saint Laurent, in the mid-2010s, with then creative director Hedi Slimane, himself no stranger to…

2 min

ELLE DECOR|September 2023

Gilty Pleasure

A couple of years ago, the owner of this apartment was in France’s rural Auvergne region during the quiet week between Christmas and New Year’s. She took to browsing real estate ads online, deciding to visit some of her discoveries on her return to Paris. “I had no intention of moving,” she insists. “It was simply out of curiosity.” That was until she stepped inside this 1,900-square-foot duplex in a 19th-century building on the city’s Right Bank. She’d been drawn by a photo of an almost psychedelic motif of interlocking cubes in metal that lined the walls of the stair hall. “It looked like something from a 1970s nightclub,” she says. What appealed to her more, however, was the apartment’s atmosphere. “It gave me a really good vibe,” she recalls.…

4 min

ELLE DECOR|September 2023

Sleep, Eat, Party, Repeat

The day is Thursday, maybe Friday, in Manhattan, and it’s early evening. Late summer, sultry. The week before, your phone had pinged with a text invite to a cocktail party at Rebecca Gardner’s Greenwich Village apartment. You’d only met her once, on an airplane. But the way she’d made that chance encounter sparkle inspired you to cut off work early and be here now, pulling open an ornate gold door on Fifth Avenue. That the 15-story prewar building began life as a hotel is fitting. Gardner is hospitality incarnate. This welcoming spirit is why, just over a decade ago, at the age of barely 30, Gardner founded Houses & Parties, an events and interior design collective dedicated to her two greatest passions. Indeed, she so missed hosting during the pandemic…

5 min

ELLE DECOR|September 2023

ON CLOSER INSPECTION

“I discovered Villa Planchart, the house that Italian architect Gio Ponti built for the car dealer Armando Planchart and his wife, Anala, while I was researching Italian midcentury design. The house in Caracas, Venezuela, is now owned and maintained by a foundation in the homeowners’ names and has been kept in its original condition since 1956. As I grew increasingly familiar with Ponti, his work became more than just beautiful. His buildings are testaments to how a well-designed space should feel and function. I love his use of marble to make patterns on the floor, fusing the interior and exterior spaces to create a home that suited its owners but also reflected his vision. That and his use of color and stripes on the ceiling allow for depth, texture, and…

1 min

ELLE DECOR|September 2023

THE AGENDA

EAT: KYOTO HAI, CHEF! Though Kyoto, with its plentiful temples, is widely considered the seat of Japan’s cultural heritage, the city has modernist bona fides too. For evidence, look no further than ELLE DECOR A-List architect Stephanie Goto’s elegant scheme for Jean-Georges at the Shinmonzen, the restaurant in a new boutique hotel designed by Tadao Ando. Local craft traditions, like the space’s shikkui plaster walls in deep crimson, and the raw beauty of natural materials, as in the bar made from a single slab of heavily veined Rosso Antico stone, inspired Goto’s interiors. “We wanted to keep everything very simple” but offer “whimsy and an unexpected quality” on a closer look, says Goto. Mission accomplished. —Asad Syrkett theshinmonzen.com SHOP: PARIS FINISHING TOUCH Belgian fashion icon Dries Van Noten’s designs are…

3 min

ELLE DECOR|September 2023

COUTURE COOKING

Daniele Busca tells of a client who went hunting for rugs to match the artwork in his new kitchen. The New York City–based creative director of Scavolini USA, the Italian design company, was impressed that the painting hanging near the client’s island was a mustard yellow Picasso. “A Picasso in the kitchen,” he marveled. “That’s glamorous.” Long ago, the kitchen was the embodiment of domestic servitude—plain, functional, and unobtrusive. Now it’s evolved into the centerpiece of home life, taking on the coloring, materials, and textures of the room into which it flows. Today’s kitchen may be arrayed along a living room wall or suddenly pop up when you turn a corner of the family room. Either way, it’s expected to put its best face forward. This means out with naked…

3 min

ELLE DECOR|September 2023

The Belle of Bel-Air

More is more, as the adage goes. That’s certainly always been the motto of beauty entrepreneurs Jerrod Blandino and Jeremy Johnson. The California-based founders of the makeup brand Too Faced have always relished excess, so perhaps it’s not surprising that for them, one home wasn’t enough—even when it is a maximalist mansion designed to their hearts’ content. Their 17,000-square-foot home in Corona del Mar, featured in ELLE DECOR in March 2019, has Chanel tweed upholstery and a malachite-hued library. It is where they spend their workweek running Toy Box Brands, a beauty brand lab they started after selling Too Faced to Estée Lauder in 2016. In early 2020, the couple bought a second home, in Bel-Air. After living in it for a year, they reached out to the designer of…

5 min

ELLE DECOR|September 2023

Through the Fire

On a ruggedly picturesque hilltop abutting the Los Padres National Forest in Montecito, California, stands a home that’s a monument to self-suffciency. But it wasn’t always that way. The owners, a worldly husband and wife with a passion for collecting art, had made peace with their middling Spanish Mediterranean–style house when the devastating Thomas Fire of 2017 tore through the property and forced a new beginning. The couple had intended to rebuild their previous home as it was when designer and architect Jamie Bush came on board, pushing them to consider a different direction entirely. To accommodate building laws, Bush suggested a house with the exact same footprint but pared back, with hyperfunctional interior architecture. It would be constructed, with the help of architecture firm Shubin Donaldson, from hard-wearing materials,…

5 min