Innholdsfortegnelse for Fall 2016 i MILIEU

My awesome grandson, Connor, came to my home for his annual summer visit recently and while he was here helped me style our tablescapes photo shoot. He is one of those children who never meets a stranger, is always self-assured, and up for any task presented to him. I enjoyed watching him interact with our crew and photographer with a complete confidence in his skills at setting up the perfect shot — even if he is only nine years old. I began to think about all the wonderfully creative people with whom we come in contact, and how any time you express your creativity, you set yourself up for praise or criticism. I am constantly reminded of this when each and every project is submitted to MILIEU. I recognize and…

In 1972, Tony Duquette, the celebrated artist, interior decorator, set designer, and jeweler brought on a young man named Hutton Wilkinson, all of seventeen years old, to be his apprentice for zero salary for the first two years. Then, Duquette started paying him a lavish five dollars an hour. With that, Wilkinson packed up and started doing interior decorating work on his own — so successfully that Duquette wised up and the two started investing together in real estate. By 1989, they formally became partners. But theirs was more than just a business arrangement. It was a mentorship-cum-father-son relationship that lasted until Duquette’s death in 1999. Now Wilkinson, who lives in Los Angeles, runs what is called Tony Duquette Inc. and The Anthony and Elizabeth Duquette Foundation for the Living…

My fascination with watches is not so distant from my intrigue with design. I am captivated by the complexity of the movement of timepieces, which dovetails with my design propensities for what I call “morphic” furniture, pieces that have multiple uses. Not unlike the interiors I design, I gravitate toward watches that are classic black and white in hue and that will never date — in essence, remain timeless. Watches are a default to my otherwise indifference to fashion. I have two ways of dressing: baseball cap, ripped jeans, and everything “Gap” in between, though I do have an impressive shoe collection; on the other end of the spectrum are custom tailored suits and black-tie garb, along with shirts I design for myself. Hence the extreme diversity of my watch…

As a boy growing up in Vermont, Jason Flinn was used to chasing the sun. Its rays and warmth were maddeningly elusive, so that when the sun did shine, he wanted to be immersed in its glow. His love of that is one reason why he and his longtime partner, the noted designer and antiques dealer Serge Castella, moved to Spain’s Costa Brava and where they have lived and thrived for decades. But in a region of the Iberian Peninsula where the sun is ubiquitous, most of the inhabitants often seek refuge from its harshness and glare. “We saw this house, oddly and luckily situated in the rolling hills of the region, and knew even from the road that it was right for us,” Flinn recalls. The circa-1960s Modernist house…

“For inspiration, I always have to dig, go back to the roots of something,” says French master perfumer Francis Kurkdjian, who began his career with a splash. At age twenty-five, he created Le Mâle, the first men’s fragrance for couturier Jean-Paul Gaultier, to great acclaim. Introduced in 1995, the legendary best seller has been making waves ever since. So has its creator. “It was my first ever perfume,” recounts the now celebrated perfumer, whose scores of successful scents include those for many major fashion brands — Dior, Elie Saab, Armani, Kenzo, and Yves Saint Laurent. His own irresistibly singular fragrance brands — like Aqua Vitae — are especially sought after. He opened his bespoke perfume atelier in 2001 and won the prestigious Coty Prize the same year for “lifetime achievement.”…

SERGE CASTELLA & JASON FLINN Working in close consort with his life and business partner, Jason Flinn, Serge Castella is known worldwide as a distinctive interior designer, product designer, and antiques dealer. Though born in the south of France, Castella has long been based in Spain, though his and Flinn’s projects are found throughout the world — New York, Israel, London, and beyond. Castella recently created a line of textiles for the Spanish fabric company Gancedo; known as the Port Lligat collection, the novel designs reference natural elements of the Mediterranean. CAROLINA IRVING Carolina Irving admits to having “always been obsessed with fabrics, colors, and textures,” evident in her Paris home. She has long been a fixture of the design world, having worked as a staff magazine editor, a cofounder…

It didn’t take long upon moving to Atlanta twenty years ago with my family for me to realize how the city genuinely functions as the capital of the Southeast — in terms of culture, sports, and shopping. Because I had always worked in design, notably in Indianapolis, from which my husband, John Morris, and our daughter, Alexandra, had come those many years ago, I recognized that Atlanta would be the right place for me to focus on high-end residential work. One of its defining and fascinating features is that Atlanta manages to function as a major city interspersed with some of the most beautiful residential neighborhoods in America. That dynamic shouldn’t be surprising since I think one of the things that distinguishes the South from other regions in the country…

MILIEU met Elisabeth Holder Raberin, co-president of Ladurée, in the courtyard of her company’s U.S. flagship restaurant in New York’s SoHo, where we sampled from plates of multi-colored macarons as she spoke about her favorite things in life. We admitted that one of our favorite things was Ladurée macarons, those delightful creations made of California almonds, egg whites, and some eighteen natural flavors. Although the Ladurée brand dates back 150 years, Elisabeth’s father purchased the venerable brand in 1996, naming her co-president of Ladurée USA, along with her husband, Pierre-Antoine. Ladurée operates more than one hundred restaurants/patisseries worldwide. Elisabeth and her husband and children live in New York.…

It’s every homeowner’s dream: to create a place in which each room is inviting and artfully arranged. When the husband and wife owners sought a counterpoint to their suburban residence, they found a four-story townhouse in downtown Chicago with full-on river views that seemed the ideal home for achieving their goals. But their vision for how they wanted to live there proved more difficult to realize than expected. “We’d found a home that we loved and renovated it in the industrial loft style that we loved, but when we began to furnish it something didn’t feel right,” the husband recalls. “The dots were not connecting.” Enter interior designer Michael Del Piero, whose work was recommended to the couple for her distinctive style that melds strong shapes, salvaged surfaces, and elegant…

While traveling to England last June, I was particularly thrilled because I knew that part of my trip would include meeting Mary Fox Linton, a woman I’ve admired for her work as an interior designer and for her ever-evolving line of luxurious fabrics she distributes through Fox Linton. Fox Linton Associates has remained one of the names in interior design for decades — for residences and hotel projects, the latter often done in collaboration with Gordon Campbell Gray. Mary helped create the look for London’s One Aldwych, which virtually redefined the aesthetic for boutique hotels everywhere. Mary Fox Linton established her business in the 1970s and she has continued to be referred to as the “Grande Dame of Groovy.” The moniker still holds true, for her aesthetic remains stylish and…

Interior designer Betsy Brown is, at once, a classicist and a modernist. The Birmingham-based designer favors clean lines and hard edges, but manages to temper rooms with highly crafted details and wellchosen antiques that result in comfort. “I really look for interiors to be relaxed, to make you feel like you’re on vacation, as if the world went away and all you have around you is super comfortable, totally relaxed space,” she says. The objective is the same when she designs her own rooms. “Unlike some designers, who find designing for themselves so easy because they know themselves so well, I find the opposite to be true,” Brown confesses. “I feel that I can get inside the heads of my clients very easily, but it’s almost as if, as my…