Photo by Pieter Estersohn
- Lately, I’m inspired by…
- Designing and building a house for myself at Schooner Bay, Abaco, Bahamas, a new beach town and harbor being built on New Urbanism principles.
- In a word, my style is…
- Cheerful.
- If I owned just one piece of art, it would be…
- Any great Gauguin Tahitian painting with figures. I find the languor of the subjects and the nobility of the primitive people to be very moving.
- Favorite decorators…
- Frances Elkins for simultaneous restraint and drama. Nancy Lancaster for her emphasis on comfort and her light heart. David Hicks for a boldness that always still manages to be appropriate. Billy Baldwin for a versatility and flexibility with his impressive cast of ladies [clients], all with great tastes of their own. Alberto Pinto — his deftness with the exotic is astounding. Albert Hadley, our American master.
- Dream client…
- One who says, “I want to live the way you want to live.”
- Where I shop for clients…
- New York: Angus Wilkie’s Cove Landing. L.A.: Lynn von Kersting’s Indigo Seas. Paris: Doris Brynner’s, who oversees Dior’s interior design department in the shop on Avenue Montaigne. Palm Beach: Bruce Erhard. Sag Harbor: Eliza Werner’s Sage Street Street Antiques.
- And for myself…
- Amazon Prime.
- An easy way to update a room…
- Clean windows and draconian editing.
- Your dream weekend destination…
- John Stefanidis’ house on Patmos. His rustic house, the weather, the pace of life on an Aegean island is everything I dream of.