Table of contents for Summer 2018 in MILIEU

WHEN WE STARTED OUT as a small team at MILIEU five years ago, we recognized something we wanted to achieve: to create a new magazine that honored and introduced top design talent. With every issue, we continue to grow, with more readers and a wider reach around the world. We delight in discovering, interviewing and highlighting interior and landscape designers, architects, artisans, visual artists, furniture makers, and other personalities who excite us. And along the way, we learn their meaning of success and achievement. While interviewing the legendary Mario Buatta, he told us that he knew he wanted to be an interior decorator (as he prefers to call himself) from the time he was a boy growing up on Staten Island. Mona Caron, a San Francisco–based muralist, responds so strongly…

Otis Weis looked at the world of textiles and saw something that was missing. “I wanted to create a destination, a place for designers and clients to go, where they would find warm, contemporary textiles,” says the young entrepreneur whose namesake company, Otis Textiles, was established less than two years ago in Los Angeles. As a former London-based investment banker, Weis decided to metaphorically weave a new life for himself, as a maker of textiles, a role inspired by his mother, interior designer Kathryn Ireland. “Although my strongest suits might be finance and business, I do think I have an understanding of the designs people want on a more contemporary scale.” The distinguishing attributes of Weis’s line are his muted solid hues, along with subtle stripes and sheers. “I’ve created…

Visions of landscapes, clouds, and everyday objects inhabit our minds and serve as concrete symbols that give us a sense of where and who we are. A bird with wings in motion, a stand of trees, an apple, a tortoise-shell comb, a yellow-tipped matchstick, and a long-stemmed glass have little meaning beyond what our minds associate with each of these objects. We assume an apple is a fruit we take in our hand and raise to our mouths to bite and savor, or that a comb will serve the purpose of arranging a head of disheveled hair. René Magritte (1898–1967), however, spent his artistic lifetime prompting viewers of his work to challenge their perceptions of what makes the world, and for the first time, many of his most celebrated works…

JILL AND KEVIN CADIEUX had put all their eggs in one basket. And when they returned from the chicken coop beside their California home, they began sorting through those eggs with designer Amy Meier. “It was our very first meeting,” recalls Meier, “and I was asking the clients about their likes and dislikes. Jill started pulling eggs out of the basket and talking about colors, and about how she and Kevin live and dress. The three of us compared the shades of their eggs, all those soft blues and greens and tans. Then we discussed how the pink and purple flowers from their garden pulled so naturally into that scheme. Suddenly, we had our color palette.” Another designer might have brought a fan deck of paint colors to that client…

THE BRUGES DESIGNER and antiques dealer Jean-Philippe Demeyer created domestic interiors for his client, Johan Gryp, one of the city’s premier florists, that reveal much about Belgian design today. Demeyer fashioned imaginative rooms that are as much about his and the client’s aesthetics as they are practical solutions to how the residence needs to function. First, the project is not only a residence, but a three-in-one combination of home, flower shop/atelier, and English-style country garden. Gryp decided to update the 1992 property as a “sort of birthday present to myself,” he says. Located in suburban Loppem about ten minutes south of Bruges, the property is set amid a beech-hedged rose garden and a hydrangea walk. The entrance is reached through an outdoor explosion of greenery—in pots and out—and centers on…

COVER Interior Design: Amy Meier, Amy Meier Design, amymeierdesign.com, 858-848-4151. Photography: Karyn Millet, karynmillet.com. GREEN WITH ENVY Page 26 Circa 1900 German, few of a set of fifty-one biological models depicting cell development, plaster on painted wood bases, manufactured by Luis M. Meusel, W. GARDNER, LTD., wgardnerltd.com. Pages 28–29 (from left to right) Lundy hang pendant, THE URBAN ELECTRIC CO., urbanelectricco.com. Topiary Garden by Susan Hable, gouache on paper, BUNGALOW CLASSIC, bungalowclassic.com. Valentine lamp, PECKY, peckysrq.com. Zephir Rainforest rug, NEW MOON RUGS, newmoonrugs.com. Embroidered leather shoes with ankle strap in green leather, GUCCI, gucci.com. Circa 1900 German, one of a set of fifty-one biological models depicting cell development, plaster on painted wood bases, manufactured by Luis M. Meusel, W. GARDNER, LTD., wgardnerltd.com. Rosie Assoulin sleeveless plaid dress, MODA OPERANDI, modaoperandi.com.…

Oro del Negro and Manuel Villanueva Oro del Negro and Manuel Villanueva are the founders of Moredesign, a Mallorca, Spain–based firm whose mission is to foster what the designers refer to as “Mediterranean Architecture”. Their projects reflect a fusion of contemporary design with traditional, vernacular practices and construction methods. Despite maintaining a focus on Mallorca, the duo has completed projects in Sicily, Brazil, Mexico, Dominican Republic, the Bahamas, and elsewhere. Sandra Chancey During her many years in practice as the founder and managing partner of Chancey Interior Design, in Tampa, Sandra has completed a wide variety of project types, including high-end residences, hotels, and commercial spaces. Sandra’s diverse design vocabulary includes an ability to be “fluent” in both traditional and modern. She cites her influences as being her extensive world…

NORTHERN CALIFORNIA “When I tell people I’m from California,” says interior designer Nathan Turner, “they imagine a scene from Baywatch.” While Turner did spend much of his childhood outdoors, it was often bundled up in a jacket, clamming, eating fresh oysters, and shivering with his family on their boat in Tomales Bay. “Up north, the fog rolls in practically every night, changing the light and your mood and everything that’s happening in the moment. It’s a mood I like, and the fog never bothered me; I found it kind of comforting and, as a kid, it was a signal that it was time to go to bed. Though I hadn’t yet heard the Danish term hygge—a sense of feeling cozy, charming, or special—we were living it every day.” CENTRAL CALIFORNIA…

While the other girls in her rural Oklahoma town were hitting the mall and experimenting with makeup, Stephanie Seal Brown was at home, teaching herself how to weave. “I was very bookish as a child,” recalls Seal Brown, now forty-two, designer and weaver of an eponymous line of linen trimmings. “I used handcrafts to help pull me out of my head.” Every year, she would teach herself a new craft: sewing, quilting, embroidery. The summer she was nineteen, she discovered weaving. “And that,” she says, “was the thing that stuck.” She took her earliest lessons from library books, making practice swatches on a small table loom her then-boyfriend built for her. That loom barely worked before breaking altogether, but it gave Seal Brown enough of a start that she knew…

“I’ve got a traditional soul that I want to express through modern interiors.”—Sandra Chancey WHEN TALKING ABOUT the all-white palette of her Tampa home, designer Sandra Chancey likes to tell a little white lie. If people ask her about the special hue that covers all of the walls and ceilings, as well as the exterior of the house, she claims to have a custom “secret formula”. When pressed, though, she tells the truth. “I went to a Benjamin Moore dealer and told him what I wanted, a white without any tinges of blue or yellow,” says Chancey, who heads her own firm in Tampa. “He came back and handed me something and said, ‘This is it.’ What he gave me was the actual base they use to make all hues…

DEEP IN THE WOODS of Mississippi, just south of the capital of Jackson, down a dirt road, over a cattle gap, and across a wooden bridge, is a plot of forested land atop a bluff along the Pearl River. Once, it was the site of a wooden “shotgun” house under an ancient oak, and before that to Native Americans who worked and hunted on the land, leaving reminders of their presence in the form of carved arrowheads that can still be found buried in the ground. Today, the remote, serene escape is a second home to two Jackson-based law partners and their families, complete with a spectacular three-story cabin aptly named River Oak. It is here that interior designer Lisa Palmer executed a design plan in a way that only…

THE ONE THING A WELL-DECORATED ROOM NEEDS TO HAVE? Books. They make for a well-rounded brain. WHEN YOU VISIT THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, WHAT’S THE FIRST THING YOU GO TO SEE? The bookstore. I race in to see what new books they have. AND AFTER THE BOOKSTORE? Furniture, porcelain, silver. Anything to do with the home. THE MOST VALUABLE/PRECIOUS OBJECT YOU OWN? My sanity. SOMETHING YOU’VE ACCOMPLISHED ABOUT WHICH YOU ARE ESPECIALLY PROUD? My career, having been called “The Prince of Chintz”, which is something I have always loved since childhood, when I first opened my eyes. A ROOM YOU’VE SEEN AND NEVER FORGOTTEN? Nancy Lancaster’s “buttah yellow” room in London. I saw it in a book in 1961 and then in person in London in 1964. After that,…

Caroline Cecil’s textile designs are all new, though they begin with something old. Cecil, who commutes between her studios in Los Angeles and Portland (Oregon), starts her process by taking out her grandmother’s paint brushes, dipping them in vats of black India ink, and painting designs on to paper or a canvas surface. “My grandmother was a professional watercolor artist and she taught me how to paint from a young age,” says Cecil. “I love carrying on the tradition of female artists in our family.” Using a silkscreening process, Cecil’s clean, minimalist designs are then transferred directly on to heritage linens from Belgium and Ireland, during which she assesses her array of subtle, yet graphically vibrant color waves. “I have a deep appreciation for the artisan-made. Our fabrics celebrate the…

With an acre to tackle on her Welsh country property, designer Penny Morrison followed her instinct to compartmentalize, with each outdoor “room” assigned its own task, beginning with an actual room devoted to potting. There, an ever-growing variety of pots await her choices. Morrison’s obsession with the outdoors is written all over her landscape. Its lure explains why she and husband Guy Morrison divide their week evenly between London and Wales. She was instantly drawn to the 150-acre property for its embrace of all the “big country” vistas typical of Wales. The landscape is so remote and hushed, she can sit out on a summer’s evening until twilight and hear nothing but birds chattering in yonder woods. Despite Morrison’s insistence that she didn’t plan the gardens, they have a disarming…

SOME FAMILIES NOT only live well together, but also appreciate good design together. Such is the case with the large Scandinavian family who owns and shares this recently renovated home near the lovely Spanish Mallorcan village of Deià. The family members use the island home as a regular getaway property when they seek the sun and warmth of southern Europe. To ensure that the substantial renovation of the structure would be done well and with sensitivity, they hired Moredesign, a local design practice known for its commitment to honoring Mallorcan architectural traditions. “Our team had to make sure the house could accommodate multiple needs with people coming and going, while creating an intelligent yet simple and beautiful space,” says designer Manuel Villanueva. “The family is design-savvy and were very much…

MELISSA SELLARS FOLLOWED a goat path to the house of her dreams. She had scaled the inclined clearing hoping to be rewarded with a panoramic view of Harbour Island, the Bahamas locale in which she, a North Carolina–based interior designer, and her husband and family, had a vacation home. “I found what I was looking for at the top, a staggering view that practically took in the whole of the island, but I also came upon something else I hadn’t expected, and which some people might not have found as captivating.” She refers to what was then a very modest single-story cinderblock house. Although the dwelling was hardly majestic, the view was, and in the way that only a true designer is able, Sellars was already envisioning a new home…

1. The Victoria Range is the newest addition to the Sicily is My Love SMEG x Dolce & Gabbana Collection. The design is reminiscent of the traditional blue and white Italian pottery pattern. The range features an ultra-rapid, 18,000-BTU brass burner for maximum heat distribution and eight pro-cooking functions. smegusa.com 2. If you’re building a new home or adding on a room or patio, Peacock Pavers can add that touch of timeless old world elegance you’re looking for and at an affordable price. New colors of pavers introduced are Keystone Grey, Oyster, and Slate, as well as new shapes. All are ideal for your interior and exterior construction projects. peacockpavers.com 3. A variety of unusual braids, cords, and fringes add the perfect finishing touch to contemporary Osborne & Little fabrics…