Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2023 i MILIEU

One of my favorite kinds of people is someone you might call a forward thinker. We have a popular column in each issue of MILIEU titled “Forward Thinkers,” which highlights designers, artists, and artisans who are doing exactly that—looking and thinking ahead, creating anew. The more I think about it, though, the more I realize that in every article we publish, the focus, ultimately, is on a forward thinker. Despite the fact that some of the people we feature might have been immersed in their professions for decades, what makes them special is their ability to make all “next projects” feel like a first one. The interior designers in this issue, for instance, are seasoned professionals, yet they respond to the project at hand in wholly original ways. What’s right…

Shane Robuck speaks Italian so well that he is often mistaken for a native when wandering the booths of the Parma antiques fair. “I learned to speak Italian from the Scuola di Vita, or what translates as the School of Life,” says Robuck, who, along with co-owner Kristen Walls, operates Robuck, an Atlanta emporium for the finest Continental antiques, most dating from the 17th and 18th centuries. Robuck seems to have graduated with other “degrees”, too, from that particular school, for he has become so attuned to the provenance of antiques during his decades in the business, particularly items made in Italy, that he can accurately guess much about their authenticity. “That’s the most fun aspect of what I do. I can look at a piece of furniture at some…

Even though socializing stopped for most people during the pandemic, it continued on at New York’s Frick Collection. When the venerable institution closed its doors in March 2020, leaving its Rembrandts, Vermeers, the wandering-eyed Bronzino portrait of Lodovico Capponi, the playful Fragonards and the sober Chardin still life to go unvisited for what would be a full year, three Frick curators found a way to be with us. Xavier Salomon, Aimee Ng, and Giulio Dalvit began to broadcast, live and unscripted from their own homes, something called Cocktails with a Curator, a series watched by some 1.8 million viewers. Now that the museum is fully open again, a new book of the same name (published by Rizzoli) features shortened versions of those web performances. For 65 weeks, the Frick curators…

WHEN IT COMES TO finding all the right things for their clients, interior designers Randall Powers and Chris Alexander admit to never stopping their search, even when a project is supposedly finished. “We really shop the world,” says the Houston-based Powers, “and even though we’ve long been ‘finished’ with this project, there are still items on the couple’s wish list that Chris and I are looking for. Chris and I are never limited to just one resource for finding what we know is right for an interior.” But in assessing their work on a spacious, open-plan Mediterranean-style house in Houston’s “West U” neighborhood, Powers and Alexander concur that they “have had a lot of fun finding the furnishings and antiques, and we’ve shared a very open creative process with the…

THE ELEMENTS THAT LIE just outside this penthouse apartment in San Francisco — the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz, distant Napa Valley, whitecaps on the bay waters, the rolling morning fog—are as much a part of the décor as the furnishings and architectural elements within. “This home takes in 360-degree views of the city,” says interior designer Suzanne Tucker, “and there is no aspect of San Francisco that isn’t visible.” As architect Andrew Skurman says of his work on the interiors of this home in a Beaux Arts-style apartment building constructed in 1924, “This is the building of the city, and this is the apartment of the building. There is no better place.” Both Skurman and Tucker know all about this address, since they have both worked over the years on…

“This house is very different from others we’ve done, and so it is one of our favorites.”—ISABEL LÓPEZ-QUESADA “An Artful Life” p. 92 “The clients only wanted the best of the best, which was a fun dynamic for Chris and me.”—RANDALL POWERS “Finding Common Ground” p. 108 “This was a practical, respectful treatment of a historic home that reflects the way people live today.”—DAVID FRAZIER “Georgia On His Mind” p. 120 “Restoring and decorating the rooms of this great house remains a lifetime’s project.”—OLIVIA, DUCHESS OF GRAFTON “Ancestral Ties” p. 132 “This is a beautiful, luxurious home, but it’s also a real place to live.”—SUZANNE TUCKER “Rooms With Views” p. 144…

When my family and I set off for Iceland, we didn’t quite know what to expect. Like most travelers heading to the Land of Fire and Ice, we prepared for unpredictable weather, packing the requisite puffer jackets, rain gear, and crossover boots, as every guidebook recommends. My only exposure to Iceland had been the hypnotic music of Björk, the country’s most famous avant-garde popstar who shocked the world by wearing to the 2001 Oscars a feathered frock fashioned into a swan. However, it was the 2013 film, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, following the epic journey of the fictional Walter Mitty (played by Ben Stiller) across the otherworldly landscape of Iceland, that made my heart skip a beat. Watching Walter traverse snowcapped mountains and longboard through an erupting volcano…

IT WAS A WONDERFUL PLACE to grow up,” says New York–based architect and designer David Frazier of his hometown, West Point, Georgia. It’s the place that formed him and where his family and friends still reside. And it is where he returned to restore and expand a house. Situated midway between Atlanta and Montgomery—and less than an hour from FDR’s “Little White House” in Warm Springs—West Point has fewer than 4,000 residents and is sited on the westernmost point of the Chattahoochee River, where the river turns from its southwesterly flow from the Appalachian Mountains. “I wanted to be an architect from a really young age,” says Frazier, joking about his youthful obsession with a series of video games in which the player creates virtual people for whom he can then…

COVER Produced by: Casa Gusto, getthegusto.com Photography: Charles Peed Canopy is heavily hand-embroidered suzani featuring repeating lines and encasing a pair of lions, B. VIZ DESIGN, bvizdesign.com. Ticking stripe in brown, IAN MANKIN, ianmankin.co.uk. Bed linens are SFERRA, sferra.com. Pillows are woven check pillow in ruby and pair of woven stripe pillows in coral rose, all COURTNEY BARTON, courtneybarton.com. FROM THE DESK OF… Page 28 Alma pendant light, ORIGINAL BTC, originalbtc.com. Aviator Grand checked luggage in Scout Tan, PARAVEL, tourparavel.com. Vintage framed drawing, PLAIN GOODS, plain-goods.com. Elle fabric sofa, BERNHARDT, bernhardt.com. Laurence Tavernier crossed faux fur slippers in Ecru, INDULGE DÉCOR + FASHION, indulgedecorandfashion.com. Page 29 All-weather garden boot in white, LUCCHESE, lucchese.com. "A" dining table in bleached ash and waxed aluminum, FERN, fernnyc.com. Whitney sunglasses in Crema, TRANSPARENT, transparentsunglasses.com.…

Like a camera zooming in, Alex Katz takes viewers high into the branches of a tree. The thick, black boughs of radiant yellow leaves fill our vision, and we are engulfed in the tree’s movement as it shifts in the wind to reveal glimpses of a clear, blue sky. Yellow Tree 1 (2020) evokes the vibrant energy of life in present tense, capturing a fleeting instant of beauty with vivid, penetrating sensation. Katz reveals how painting can bring us to a more intense awareness of the ways we encounter the world moment-to-moment. A new exhibition on the prolific New York artist at the Guggenheim Museum, Alex Katz: Gathering (through February 20), brings together more than 200 works spanning eight decades. The show reveals a distinctive painterly style characterized by Katz’s…

LONG AFTER THEY ATTENDED college together in Madrid, interior designer Isabel López-Quesada and art dealer Aina Nowack remained close friends, but from afar. While López-Quesada stayed mostly in Spain, establishing herself as one of Europe’s leading designers, Nowack moved to Buenos Aires with her husband. However, thanks to the bond they maintained, when the time came for Nowack to move back to Spain with her husband and three sons as the boys reached school age, the two women readily picked up where they left off. “Everything is easy with Isabel,” says Nowack. Given their common professional interests and close friendship, it was a simple decision for Nowack to tap López-Quesada to work on the renovation of her family’s new home in El Viso, an upscale neighborhood of Madrid, where López-Quesada…

MY FOREMOST childhood memory here is us madly racing around the dining table every Christmas,” says Harry FitzRoy, 12th Duke of Grafton, as he and his wife, Olivia, stand in the dining room of his family home, Euston Hall. Affable and charismatic, the former Rolling Stones events manager has brought his stately inheritance into a new dawn. The house, built in 1666, first came into the FitzRoy family through the marriage of heiress Lady Isabella Bennett to Harry’s ancestor, Henry, Earl of Euston. A son of “the merry monarch” King Charles II by his mistress Barbara Villiers, Henry was agreed to as a suitable match by the then-owner of the estate, the Earl of Arlington, for his daughter if, as he cannily petitioned the king, she could be a duchess.…

Recognized as the first jeune fille admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and to receive a degree in architecture from the École—in addition to being the first female architect licensed in California and the first woman to receive the American Institute of Architecture’s Gold Medal—Julia Morgan (1872–1957) remains a towering figure in the history of architectural design. Morgan, who was accomplished in various styles and in myriad types of buildings, is best known for the Hearst Castle, in San Simeon, California. The result of a decades-long collaborative relationship with William Randolph Hearst, the Spanish Colonial Revival mansion and contiguous structures on his hilltop estate became Hearst’s definitive statement of unbridled wealth—just as it was Morgan’s ultimate architectural triumph. Over the course of her career, Morgan designed more than…