Innholdsfortegnelse for March/April 2023 i Veranda

“Nothing is interesting unless it is personal.”— BILLY BALDWIN OUR HOMES ARE OUR MEMOIRS. American decorator Billy Baldwin believed this, arguing that the most compelling interiors are filled with stamps of their owners’ personalities. He famously turned his one-room Manhattan apartment into a revealing library, where he surrounded himself with scores of books (his favorite raconteurs), glossy chocolate walls (a bit of restrained glamour), and myriad curiosities. In this issue we explore the role of self-expression in design and the idea that, as Baldwin so deftly illustrated, what’s personal is perfection.…

THE VOGUE NATURALIST Call her the wild child of decorating, a hobbyist hunter of anything unearthed, untamed, and alive. Natural world objects turn her salon into a shimmering portal to the great outdoors with silvered seashells glinting from bookcases, meadow flowers sprouting in lacquered frames, and faux-bois urns and ceramic insects immortalizing a quiet walk in the woods. THE DEVOUT MODERNIST Nothing trumps purity of form and material for this soulful aesthete. Tactile craft discoveries make for a strong supporting cast to her clean-lined furnishings and introspective art—think bulbous handblown glass vases, a hammered iron candelabra, and brass-plated portraiture—not to mention worthy conversation pieces that beg closer inspection. Perhaps over a vodka martini served on a fossil stone platter. THE NEW-SCHOOL CLASSICIST He’s a Grand Tour antiquarian with a rowdy…

IT STARTED WITH A CONVERSAT ION between two friends during that first COVID-19 quarantine weekend in March 2020. Acknowledging how lucky they were to be able to work from home in New York, Moroccan-born video artist Meriem Bennani and Israeli-born documentary filmmaker Orian Barki confessed their relief in being forced to stay in—and the ensuing creative freedom. “It was hard to take anything seriously, in terms of deadlines. So we thought, Why don’t we do something for fun, kind of like the work you make when you’re a teenager?” recalls Bennani. “We both had an idea of doing something very existential.” Selecting a pair of 3D lizards from Bennani’s character library—“they were cute and their shiny skin worked best against the live-action backgrounds,” says Barki—the duo created a short animated…

“Flowers are the instruments of inspiration. I am just giving a voice to their secrets,” says Mexican grower and floral designer Gabriela Salazar, who credits nature’s alchemy for a career U-turn that began in the United Kingdom. She was studying architectural interiors in London when she gifted herself an arranging class for her birthday. Soon after, a friend asked her to create a weekly floral display for her bookshop, a gig that blossomed into not just a growing list of local clients but also a fascination with how plants can impact a room (and the people within it). “I believe flowers guided me into the direction of who I am,” says Salazar, who returned home to Mexico to make floristry—rather than interior design—her livelihood. But the flower markets she encountered in…

“COLOR IS A POWER which directly influences the soul,” Wassily Kandinsky once said. The artist would certainly find a kindred spirit in Benjamin Soleimani of Mansour, a well-known purveyor of fine rugs. He has a natural gift when it comes to color, which is why interior designers from all over the world seek out his eye. “To me, color is like music—you don’t just see it; you feel it,” says Soleimani. “It can be calming or transporting; color can take you to another world.” And the world he created in his Beverly Hills home in collaboration with interior designer James Radin is also transporting, like stepping inside a storied English home. Abundant antique furniture, 18th- and 19th-century fireplace surrounds, and a rich palette permeate the rooms, which are set off…

DYE, TWIST, KNOT, REPEAT Pages 48–49, left to right: Il Palio tieback with jasmins (multicolored); declercqpassementiers.fr. Trianon double tassel tieback (emerald); samuelandsons.com. Tassel tieback EGC9 (blue); passementerie-verrier.com. Mozart tassel (green); watts1874.co.uk. Tanit tieback with wicks (pink) and Plaisir de Velours key tassel (green); Declercq Passementiers. Double Tassel tieback EGL31 (white and gold); Passementerie Verrier. Plaisir de Velours two tassel tieback with wicks (green); Declercq Passementiers. Trianon double tassel tieback (chiffon); Samuel & Sons. All to the trade. Pages 50–51 Elizabeth Ashdown: 1. Georgian braid and 2. Lula braid; elizabethashdown.co.uk. Watts: 3. Coussey Quatrefoil rosette, 4. Scroll woven braid, 7. Willow tassel fringe, 9. Harlequin Barbie Ruche fringe, 10. Snooker Ball tassel fringe. Samuel & Sons: 5. Trianon key tassel and 6. Trianon Ombre border. Declercq Passementiers: 8. Tanit tieback with wicks.…

THE RELATIONSHIP WE HAVE with our home is one of the most influential on how we feel each day. Over the last three years, this is something all of us have rediscovered—at times with joy and at other times with frustration. I certainly felt the pendulum swing wildly: While the coziness and familiarity of my family’s traditional ranch home gave me immense comfort during very uncertain times, its low ceilings, outdated (and tiny) kitchen, and shared “hall bath” felt equally stifling as the days at home wore on—and my two sons grew larger. When the latter feelings overtook the former, we looked for other options, but the solution seemed clear: We would stay and renovate because we couldn’t compete with the bidding wars going on around us for not-much-higher ceilings…

I might have been born in Virginia, but I grew up in Florence. I came for college and grad school to study Italian Renaissance literature, which means I landed at the end of my teens. But then I stayed for all my 20s. My first car, my first apartment, learning to cook: They all happened in Florence. Why did I stay? Why, despite moving to New York City in my 30s, has it remained my second, perhaps truer, home and the wellspring of my work? It began in the Oltrarno: the centuries-old hive of Florence’s guild artisans, its artigiani. Forty years ago, in what’s named for the “other,” raffish side of the Arno River, I found a goldsmith (a practitioner of one of the great traditions of Florence) to help…

In the kitchen of her 1920s Spanish bungalow, Caren Rideau revels in the Los Angeles sunshine, her half-open Dutch door being the cook’s equivalent of driving a convertible. The fresh air and dazzling light mirror the kitchen designer’s breezy approach to entertaining—plus, they make the petite cook space feel a tad larger. Size, however, matters not; in her work and gatherings alike, Rideau is less concerned with the amount of space than an abundance of spirit. Uplifting yellows and bright oranges and blues—the cheerful palette of the Mexican, Moroccan, and Portuguese pottery she collects on her travels—make her tables as radiant as she is. Besides, who needs a big dining room in Southern California, where outside entertaining beckons year-round? “Guests always feel more at ease outdoors,” says the author of Caren…

MY HUSBAND, KARL BANDTEL, MET Bhante Samitha in their Introduction to Hindu Studies class at Harvard Divinity School (HDS) in the fall of 2016. That first semester was a daunting one for both of them. Karl hadn’t been a student for 27 years, and Samitha barely knew English. He was a 26-year-old Buddhist monk of the Theravadin tradition who, before coming to Cambridge, Massachusetts, had not left Sri Lanka. Though he was unfailingly kind and cheerful, he was also homesick. And cold. Karl met Bhante Kusala in another class that semester. Kusala was also from Sri Lanka but was in his third and final year at HDS and more accustomed to both the weather and the oddities of the English language. Throughout that fall our family got to know them…

THE BEST COMPLIMENT I EVER received was “Your house looks exactly like your life.” And it did at the time. It was a petit, flat-roofed, vertical, modern cube, and because of its diminutive size, the treasures loaded in it were carefully edited for their antiquity, eccentricity, and enormous scale. A good spring cleaning awakens the eye as well as the soul. It’s led me to edits and reinventions and made my house a laboratory and my heart’s playground. Though I like to think I’m a simple man, I am not. I house a lot of contradictions—all of which I believe are true. A house is an ark containing all the things to which I am drawn; the only common denominator is me. And ultimately their disparity is where the magic…

WHEN BOLD COMBINES, MAGIC UNFOLDS. This truism describes Aptware, the 18th-century terre mêlée pottery named for its Provençal town of origin, as well as the rich, long relationship of Jane Schulak and David Stark—whose shared passion for the craft is on brilliant display in their latest collaboration, At the Artisan’s Table (Vendome, 2022). “I fell in love with Aptware years ago,” says Schulak, a decorative arts collector and patron of makers from her hometown of Detroit to the ateliers of Paris, where she serves on the board of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. “I’m a pattern person,” she says, “and I’m really excited by the mix of color and patterns.” With roots reaching back to the Tang dynasty, Aptware simulates the natural marbling of stone by kneading colored clays together…

BENEATH CONSTABLE’S SKIES with their ever-present clouds, English country life unfolds in traditional scenes the artist charged with modern energy. Under similar cover of cloud in one of San Francisco’s foggiest neighborhoods, designer Palmer Weiss has channeled that spirit, injecting vivacity and color into her Edwardian home. In creating the atmosphere for the 2,400-square-foot 1911 house, Weiss notes, “I wanted to embrace the fact that it’s a smaller house and that it’s in a darker part of the city. I was very inspired by how things feel in London and how certain rooms in Charleston [, South Carolina,] feel.” Though California has been her home for the better part of the past 30 years, she was raised in that living trove of historic architecture. “Charleston is in my bones aesthetically.…