Innholdsfortegnelse for March/April 2024 i Veranda

“Taste is an emotion.”—LEE RADZIWILL If walls—and slipper chairs and chaises—could talk, the Manhattan sitting room of the late Lee Radziwill (inset) would declare through its playful Rubelli stripes her confident ethos. An American style icon of near divine influence, she honed her elegant fashion sensibility working with industry heavyweights like Diana Vreeland and Giorgio Armani. But it’s the spirit of her residences—where vibrant fabrics, global antiques, and bold color divulged a lifelong passion for travel, art, and craft—that inspired this issue’s deeply personal look inside creatives’ own homes and gardens. As Radziwill so artfully illustrated, true style comes from within.…

Ancient Greens Hicks declared that “even the most ordinary, everyday objects benefit from careful arrangement” (citrus, utensils, gum boots!), and he harmonized color and material like instruments in an orchestra. Here, pottery, oxidized metal, and carved stone appear almost archaeological in provenance. Patinaed bronze and verdigris copper marry gritty olives with emerald; glazed bowls and marbled paperweights swirl in shades from seafoam to sienna—like abstract art unearthed after centuries. Not-So-Delicate Rosy Reds Hicks famously applied aesthetic arithmetic to his interiors, selecting and placing pieces to ensure the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. This was equally instructive in arranging tablescapes, especially those led by softer tones. Shades of pink summon new strength in the company of burgundy; tortoiseshell, stone, decorative paper and glass deepen palettes with organic…

CLAUDE MONET FAMOUSLY QUIPPED THAT PERHAPS he owed his career to flowers. Indeed capturing the garden’s ephemeral beauty has long enchanted artists, from French Impressionists like Monet who thrived in plein air to the Dutch Masters to light chasers of the Scandinavian Skagen colony. To be sure, the decorative arts world shared in the spoils, for centuries producing virtuoso botanical scenes across walls and fabrics. But over time these brushstrokes faded into a boon of technology. Printers roared; artists went back to their easels. Today a resurgence is well underway. Consider the painted glassware of Barcelona’s Los Vasos de Agua Clara with light dancing through chromatic Mediterranean vegetation or Riley Sheehey’s bamboo-handled flatware alive with folksy botanical studies. The more immersive works of luxury muralists like Virginia’s Paul Montgomery or…

GATHERING is one of those overachieving words, pulling double duty as both verb and noun, and like the remarkable achiever she is (mother of five, hospitality entrepreneur, successful businesswoman), Mary Celeste Beall takes it even further. At her home at Blackberry Farm, gathering is an art form: The surrounding landscape her stage, the table her canvas. “There’s nothing I love more than creating a space for people to linger and really feel comfortable. That’s where connection is magical,” she says. With Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains as a dreamy backdrop, the enchantment is readily summoned over supper on Beall’s veranda showcasing the refined, low-key luxury that she; her late husband, Sam; and her father-in-law, Sandy, pioneered at Blackberry Farm and that Beall has since brought to its sister property, Blackberry Mountain.…

It WAS IN THE GILDED AGE salons of late 19th-century New York that Charles Lewis Tiffany established his name. Moving amid the lavish spaces and glittering company of Astors and Vanderbilts, Tiffany, a brilliant emerging entrepreneur, purveyed European gemstones, porcelain, and objets in support of the ethos “Beautiful design makes a beautiful life.” One year ago Lauren Santo Domingo stepped into that lineage as artistic director of Tiffany Home. Cofounder and chief brand officer of online fashion retailer Moda Operandi and a tastemaker of the 21st-century beau monde, Santo Domingo is a spiritual descendent of Tiffany’s entrepreneurial high style. Raised in Connecticut (as was Tiffany), Santo Domingo was imprinted by the house at an early age. “Growing up, in the most elegant dining rooms it was only Tiffany china. You…

COMPOSITIONS IN COLOR Page 20 Brinjal paint, Farrow & Ball. Megan Biram Little Big Town artwork, Design Supply Shop. 19th-century Louis Philippe chest, The Nest. Lampshade, Village Firefly. Page 22 Vintage Greek key screen, The Nest.Vintage carved oak chair, Design Supply Shop. Silver leaf demilune, Patina. Page 24 Single-arm Plain Tracery wall sconce, Charles Edwards. Welwyn wallpaper, Cowtan & Tout. Vintage oak chest, Design Supply Shop. Page 26 Hague Blue paint, Farrow & Ball. Infinity molding, Van Dykes. Antique Italian marble-topped table, Design Supply Shop. Raku wallpaper, Nobilis. PURPLE REIGN Page 47 Double Cord trim and Gallery Double Cord trim, Houlès. MEMOIRS OF THE MASTERS Pages 50–51 Small banded agate box with oval cabochon turquoise, Seaman Schepps. Page 54 Antique Spanish Savonnerie rug, Rug & Kilim. THE PAINTED GARDEN Pages…

AT VERANDA, we look to designers for advice and insight on just about everything: how to decorate our homes, how to set the table and host a memorable dinner party, how to arrange flowers, how to invest in the finer things—from jewelry to art, even where to travel, especially for architectural, design, or garden enrichment. You could say these creatives are our “gurus of the good life.” It seems only fitting that we dedicate an entire issue each year to pulling back the curtain on how the world’s top designers live in their homes. Spoiler alert: Our fourth annual Designers at Home issue is chock-full of original and outside-the-box design. Take, for instance, the Charlotte, North Carolina, penthouse interior designer Jane Schwab created for herself and her husband, with help…

Inventive Beadwork From fine glass and metallic borders inspired by palace decoration (The Vale London) to tiny French knots that appear as sparkling beads (de Gournay), the latest embroideries lose none of their sizzle in this revival. Exuberant Patterned Fringe Bolder and brighter than their 1970s predecessors, the latest trimmings shake up stripes and plaids with whimsical borders for stitched tapes (Malabar), playful texture on checks (Pierre Frey), and more. Call it fringe with benefits. Expressive Couching Like tactile line drawings, decorative threads are “couched down” by other threads in a practice that dates to the 2nd century. In contrasting colors (Harlequin) or as botanical silhouettes (Etamine), artistic new spins trace an exciting way forward. For buying information, see page 30.…

Rockefeller’s Anglo-Asian Odyssey At her Seal Harbor, Maine, estate, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and landscape architect Beatrix Farrand juxtaposed Eastern travel mementos—a Chinese moon gate, a Buddha statue, and coping tiles from the Peking wall—with British garden formality. Here, floral artist Sybil Brooke Sylvester conjures the cross-cultural woodland setting within a bark-covered container: Violet Muscari emerge from moss; hellebores mingle with coral mums and maidenhair ferns; and Queen Anne’s lace stands tall with bell-shaped andromedas. 19th-century French iron bistro tables, Lolo French Antiques Walton’s Tropical Fantasia While 20th-century classical composer Sir William Walton’s legacy lives on through his music, his wife’s endures through a triumph of her own: Giardini La Mortella. Alongside English landscape designer Russell Page, Lady Susana Walton turned a wild promontory on the Italian isle of Ischia into…

NATURE STUDY In the living room, a set of hand-colored botanicals by 18th-century British illustrator William Curtis hangs behind a Queen Anne desk. OPPOSITE: Satloff’s Luzia Royal cluster rivière (left) was inspired by her collection of 18th-century Portuguese jewelry (right). STORIED OBJETS A Victorian desk clip sculpted as a woman’s hand, French etui from the 1700s, and Wedgwood jasperware mingle with a painted box by Melissa White for Larkspur & Hawk. THE METICULOUSLY HAND-TURNED pearwood initially caught her eye, curiously shaped orbs and pieces—a set of magician’s tricks from the 19th century. Today the gorgeous wood figures grace a shelf by the antique Chinese desk in jewelry designer Emily Satloff ’s cerulean home Office. “It’s remarkable that they survived as a complete collection,” she says. “I have no idea how…

IF YOU TAKE THE crystal gemstones of Colorado and the ombré sunsets and sculptural succulents of Southern California, then you get a sense of the world that informs the work of jewelry designer and gold-smith Adam Neeley. “As a young man holding a crystal that you just found and realizing that you are the first person to see this treasure is magical,” says the Laguna Beach–based artist. “I was hooked right away.” Hooked, and understandably so. At the age of 14, Neeley sold out his first art fair in just two hours (Daryl Hannah was among his buyers). For the last 25 years, his pieces have sold to private collectors and museums, including the Smithsonian Institution, and the Laguna Art Museum is running a retrospective of his work through July.…

Crouching on a hillside by the edge of a rice field in southern Japan, I hold the arrival of spring in the palm of my hand. The messenger is a tsukushi horsetail—a slender shoot barely three inches long that resembles a mini tortoiseshell-hued spear of asparagus. I show it expectantly to Prairie Stuart-Wolff, who forages this gently wild border of the field alongside me. “A good one,” she says kindly, pointing to the shoot’s tiny head, which has not yet burst. “That’s what we want; they will taste the best,” she says, returning her eyes to the verdant patch we’re poring over. She rhythmically snaps up horsetails where I can barely spy them. I feel the nascent warmth of a student who follows a teacher. It matches the warmth of…

AMONG THE UNDULATING FELLS of northern Lancashire, sheep grazing peacefully all around, sits Whittington Hall, the castellated Jacobeanstyle home of the 15th Lord Reay (pronounced “Ray”), Aeneas, and Lady Reay, Mia. Surrounded by extensive formal gardens, parkland, and orchards of damson and apple trees, the house overlooks the spectacular Lune valley and lies at the heart of its sporting estate, comprising fishing, shooting, woodlands, and dairy. It was designed by George Webster, the prolific English architect based in Kendal in the first half of the 19th century—a period often referred to as the golden age of the English country house—and displays all his usual hallmarks: a grand imposing structure; informal turrets and chimneys; and long, tall windows to maximize light. After Aeneas’s father bought the home in 1997, his stepmother, Victoria,…