Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2016 i Architectural Digest

As part of his 50th birthday celebration a few years ago, Pieter Estersohn decided it was time at last to go to Greece. That this was his first visit to the country is perhaps surprising given his career as an acclaimed interiors photographer who shoots all over the globe and who has lived in Paris and India. “It was something I was almost intentionally holding off and waiting for,” says Estersohn, who made the trip with his father, Carl, a retired doctor, and his son, Elio, now 12. “I tortured my family by dragging them up to the top of the Acropolis. We went to Delos, to every possible Cycladic island and temple we could find.” Estersohn’s travels often tip him into what he calls “an academic curiosity,” and this…

When interior designer Eric Cohler went scouting for a Manhattan pied-à-terre for his brother Matt, one of Silicon Valley’s most dynamic venture capitalists, he was initially thinking of a low-key rental. But that changed when the siblings walked into an 1840s redbrick townhouse overlooking historic Gramercy Park. Previously broken up into several apartments, the building had been reconfigured a few years earlier into two glamorous triplexes by architect Michael Haverland, and as soon as the Cohlers stepped into the lower unit, they both thought the same thing: This is it. With a guest room and kitchenette in the English basement, entertaining areas on the parlor floor, and three bedrooms on the third level, the triplex certainly had a lot going for it, in particular its high ceilings, three fireplaces, and…

Back in 1930s London, few young millionaires cut as wide a swath as Sir Alfred Beit. The handsome MP was rapturously rich, thanks to South African diamond mines and Rhodesian railways, and also notably amorous, having been named corespondent in a headline divorce suit. Little surprise that such a bon vivant would plump for lively living quarters in the city. Around 1937 Beit acquired an 1856 Italianate pleasure palace designed by James Knowles and then hired a quartet of ultrafashionable adepts— architects Lord Gerald Wellesley and Trenwith Wills and decorators Sibyl Colefax and John Fowler—to leaven its pomp. Soon Beit and his guests were dining in a flamboyant turquoise chamber drizzled with glistening silver leaf and thumbing books in a deliriously pretty library tricked out in Bavarian rococo style. Everywhere…

PHILHARMONIC HALL SZCZECIN, POLAND, BAROZZI/VEIGA, 2014 Winner of the 2015 Mies van der Rohe Award, this performance venue shows how magnificent minimal can be. Barozzi/Veiga devised the structure (which includes a 950-seat symphony space and 200-seat theater) as an assemblage of unadorned volumes with sharply pitched roofs that echo local building types. Blend in, however, it does not. Sheathed in translucent ribbed glass, the edifice strikes an all-white pose by day and at night casts a golden glow from within, like a sawtooth apparition. SHANGHAI TOWER SHANGHAI, GENSLER, 2015 Rising 2,073 feet, this skyscraper ranks as the second-tallest building in the world (behind Dubai’s Burj Khalifa), its cylindrical silhouette twisting 120 degrees from bottom to top in order to minimize the impact of typhoon-force gusts. Concocted as a vertical city,…

For business moguls and socialites—as well as a Broadway producer and a Persian prince—interior decorator Pauline Pitt delivers rooms that comfort as well as delight. Small wonder, since her lighthearted yet classical taste is practically bred in the bone. An especially ebullient sprig on an American family tree teeming with banking Drexels and mercantile Wanamakers, the former Pauline Munn Baker grew up shuttling between a Park Avenue apartment, a Long Island estate outfitted by Elsie de Wolfe, a hunting preserve in Tallahassee, Florida, and an Addison Mizner pile in Palm Beach, the city she calls home. England’s Stansted House, the Hampshire redoubt of Pitt’s aunt Mary, the countess of Bessborough, was also part of her visual landscape. “I was fortunate to have seen so many beautiful houses,” she says. “But…

AN EYE FOR ART It was such a pleasure to open the December issue to the stories that featured collections of contemporary art. Kudos for giving ample room to the details of the pieces themselves. Also, the variety of tastes presented in the pages fascinated me. I particularly enjoyed the contrast provided by artist David Salle’s compound in East Hampton, New York [“Creative Suite”]. TEMPLE SHIPLEY Dallas CONNECTION POINT Thank you for the nod to my Instagram account (@t_yanai) on the December Editor’s Page! I agree with Margaret Russell’s sentiments in regard to the app—it has led me to so many wonderful places and, more important, connected me to so many wonderful people. TAKASHI YANAI Los Angeles RENEWED INTEREST After being a longtime reader of Architectural Digest, I stopped a…

Long before it was known as the Design District, the swath of streets sandwiched between Miami’s Little Haiti and Wynwood neighborhoods was dotted with low-lying white buildings. So when Hermès decided to open a flagship in the increasingly upscale area—joining a growing array of global fashion boutiques and high-end interiors showrooms— the French luxury brand aimed for a design that would be an elegant riff on those humble earlier structures. “We wanted to remember the old buildings instead of creating something that came from nowhere,” explains Denis Montel, artistic director of RDAI Architecture, the firm that designs stores for Hermès. “And, of course, here in Miami it’s so hot that you’re always looking for something that feels really cool and fresh.” A glass box covered in a striking exoskeleton of…

20 BEDROOMS 19 BATHS 5 HALF BATHS 20,500 SQ. FT. $7.1 MILLION Glin, Ireland For more than 700 years, this riverfront estate in County Limerick has been home to the knights of Glin, one of Ireland’s most venerable lineages. At the heart of the 380-acre property sits a Georgian manor, the construction of which began in the 18th century, expanding on an existing longhouse. In recent decades the residence was restored by the 29th knight, Desmond FitzGerald, a decorative-arts specialist who died in 2011. Now his family has put the castle on the market in the hopes that some savvy buyer will continue his life’s work. CONTACT: Sherry FitzGerald/Christie’s International Real Estate, +353-1-237-6402 4 BEDROOMS 2.5 BATHS 3,800 SQ. FT. $10.7 MILLION New York City “I wanted to celebrate the…

The first major commission secured by French garden designer Louis Benech, in 1987, was outside the village of Cernay, not far from Chartres. Things did not get off to an auspicious start. “The home is easy to find if you come from Paris, but I got lost driving from Normandy and was terrified because I was late,” remembers Benech, now a globally renowned talent with more than 300 extraordinary gardens under his belt. “When I got on the right road, the landscape became quite boring—flat brown fields as far as you could see. I thought, Who would want to live in a place like this?” The who are Prince Stanislas Poniatowski, a jovial businessman whose ancestors once ruled Poland, and his wife, Leticia. The pair had recently moved back to…