Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2016 i MILIEU

There are places to live in the world that are not only home for some of us, but also destinations everyone wants to visit and experience. We chose to highlight in MILIEU’s summer issue some especially fun and inspiring locales. When we visited with interior designer and antiques dealer Tara Shaw in her adopted New Orleans, we hopped the St. Charles streetcar with her and later walked through the streets of the French Quarter, Garden District, and Uptown as she showed us her favorite haunts. Then she took us to a second home she helped design for a noted Hollywood filmmaker in the quiet and evocative Louisiana bayous, just a couple of hours away from the city. For this issue, we also visited with designer Jane Smith in her Santa…

As a boy, Javier Sánchez Medina understood the power of tools and natural materials. He would watch his father at work, as he restored furniture and made small decorative pieces in the Spanish town of Badajoz. He saw how his father, using dyes and various woods, could bring new life to something old. While growing up in the region of Extremadura, Medina was surrounded by an area thick with grasses and reeds, the raw materials that were often used to make household pieces such as shades for windows against the strong Spanish sun and heat. Today, Medina is now recognized as one of Spain’s finest and most distinctive artisans for creating unique items made of bamboo, wicker, rattan, cotton fibers and other natural materials. In particular, his bamboo sun mirrors…

Everybody has a favorite color. White, however, is not usually what most people cite. While the hue has always been a classic when it comes to interiors, the color has particular visibility now that it serves as a versatile companion to the spectrum of grays that seem to be re-coloring the world. White has always been the go-to favorite of interior designer Rozanne Jackson and her client Pauline Pons, both of Franklin, Tennessee. “Using an overall white palette was the goal for Pauline’s vacation cottage in Florida,” says Jackson, owner of The Iron Gate, a comprehensive high-end retail emporium for home furnishings. “Pauline has white interiors in her Nashville home. We both love white and have that in common.” Pauline and Pierre Pons’s cottage nestles in the charming town of…

CHRIS BARRETT Known for her custom residences, Chris Barrett’s unique vision is well matched to the lifestyles of her clientele. The Los Angeles–based designer’s work also includes a range of commercial assignments, including the Comme Ca Restaurant in West Hollywood and Hotel Oceana in Santa Monica. Chris Barrett Textiles are in showrooms across the country. TARA SHAW New Orleans designer Tara Shaw is known for her sophisticated home designs and as an antiques dealer specializing in French, Italian, and Swedish pieces, as well as for her eponymous line of reproduction furniture, Tara Shaw Maison. She has designed celebrity homes, appeared on design television programs, and is frequently featured in shelter magazines. JANE SMITH Jane Smith, who lives and works in Santa Fe, is recognized for her artistic approach to blending…

Does food taste better when it’s eaten outdoors? Are our appetites enhanced by sunlight or moonlight, gentle breezes and the rustle of trees? Why do we wish to dine al fresco (which translates literally from the Italian as “in the fresh”) the moment the weather allows? There may be some deep philosophical reason for why most of us like to dine outdoors — whether it means on a blanket at a picnic or at a table in our own backyards, at a local sidewalk café or on a park bench with a brown bag lunch — but the desire to have meals al fresco feels almost instinctive. We seem drawn to the outdoors when it comes to food. After all, eons before we had dining tables and fine silverware, drinking…

Sand dunes, sinuous driftwood, the surf ’s blue-green cast, the shimmer of ocean waves in sunlight, these are the textures and subtle hues of the beach in Amagansett, one of a series of contiguous towns that make up the Hamptons. “The clients are not color persons and I am not a color person, and so whatever colors are introduced in the interiors of this summer home are meant to reflect what is outdoors,” says Vicente Wolf, the New York interior designer of this project for a couple and their three children. “The trick was to establish these colors so that they appeared to have a worn quality, aged, like the elements of the outdoors. When you’re in these rooms, it’s as if you’re encountering all the colorations you’d find walking…

Just five years after shifting careers from retail to interior design, Mark D. Sikes has come full circle — or, in his case, full stripe. With a classic blue and white stripe that has come to define his brand, he expanded his design prowess from interiors to women’s fashion. And we at MILIEU were so inspired by his work that we wanted to see even more of the world striped — especially on a settee and as curtains. MILEU has closely been following Sikes ever since he debuted MDS Stripes in 2015 — and he has been busy designing new collections ever since. His fashions are a seamless extension of his residential interiors, noted for their inherent good taste and breezy comfort. For him, designing women’s tunics and T’s, wrap…

MILIEU in Chicago The Chicago Botanic Garden hosted a feast for the senses this spring with the annual Antiques, Garden & Design Show. Opening with a gala preview party, the event featured a series of glorious indoor gardens conceived by Craig Bergmann Landscape Design. Patrons visited with some of the nation’s leading dealers in garden and home antiques, pottery, fine art and prints, and jewelry. Not to miss were the inspiring and educational lectures during the show’s weekend agenda with top interior and landscape designers, including Martyn Lawrence Bullard, Timothy Whealon, and Mario Nievera as well as Blackberry Farm’s educator and artisan chef, Jeff Ross. MILIEU was thrilled to be a media sponsor of the show. MILIEU at High Point LEE Industries hosted a panel presentation for their retailers from…

“Some people like to live high up to have the grand vistas,” says interior designer Jane Smith, referring to her home in New Mexico’s verdant Tesuque Valley. “I prefer to nestle in the valley and look out my windows to see nature.” And nestle she does, in a home designed to embrace the lush groves of cottonwoods, an orchard of apple and pear trees, and grasses splashed with wildflowers. The property has another attribute: the musical presence of a burbling creek. “It’s just outside my door,” she says. “Even when I can’t see it, I can hear it.” When it came to her collaboration with Santa Fe architect Lorn Tryk, Smith was hands-on from the conception of the adobestyle house. “I knew exactly what I wanted: A Northern New Mexico…

COVER: Photography: Peter Vitale, petervitale.com. Interior Design: Chris Barrett Design, chrisbarrettdesign.com. Vintage bed: BERBERE WORLD IMPORTS, berbereworldimports.com. Bed fabric: Ayana, Color: Drought, CHRIS BARRETT TEXTILES, chrisbarrettdesign.com. Cushion fabric: Dune, Color: Saltspur, CHRIS BARRETT TEXTILES, chrisbarrettdesign.com. Pillows (from left to right): Muscari, Color: Melon; Pacific Grove, Color: Goldfinch; Mendocino, Color: Suncup, Rozella, Color: Melon; Muscari, Color: Melon; CHRIS BARRETT TEXTILES, chrisbarrettdesign.com. SHOWING HIS STRIPES Written by: Candace Manroe. Photography: Peter Vitale, petervitale.com. Pages 22-28 Mark D. Sikes, markdsikes.com. All clothing and upholstery fabrics: MDS STRIPES, mdsstripes.com. ART TAKES SHAPE Written by: Loreto López Quesada. Photography: Miguel Flores-Vianna, mf-v.com. Page 32-37 Javier Sánchez Medina, javiersanchez-300@hotmail.com. MY NEW ORLEANS Written by: Tara Shaw with Linda Sherbert. Photography: Peter Vitale, petervitale.com. Page 40 Tara Shaw’s warehouse, tarashaw.com. Page 41 (Top) CALLAN CONTEMPORARY, callancontemporary.com. (Bottom)…

While painting in his studios in Brooklyn, New York, and hometown of Knoxville, Tennessee, the artist John Woodrow Kelley spends his days with the likes of Zeus, Diana, Hercules, Narcissus, and other notables from Greek and Roman mythology and the Roman Empire. “I love figures like Diana, because she’s the original strong woman, an independent thinker, free from conventions. As for the messenger Mercury, he’s the great enabler of stories we like to hear and tell.” Kelley might be referring to himself as a painter. He recalls his days as an art student when it was unfashionable to paint the human figure in realistic ways. “I was told by professors, ‘You can’t do what you’re doing.’” But with the fortitude of the gods and goddesses and emperors he depicts, Kelley…