This morning my children decided they wanted school food for lunch (I won't elaborate on that, it's reserved for my rant pages), so at 7:20 am I found myself with 15 minutes of really free time. For me, this translated into quickly plopping myself, coffee cup in hand, into a chair bathed in the warmth of the eastern Sun and grabbing from the pile next to the fireplace a magazine that came out months ago and never got read.
It happened to be the May issue of HouseBeautiful with a perky but otherwise not that inspiring breakfast room on its cover. Maybe that's why it had ended in The Pile. I went straight for Mr Newell Turner's piece on how he's a design junkie (believable), seguing into how "recent natural disasters around the world tend to make decorating seem more of a luxury than a necessity". Decorating any living space is a necessity as long as it involves a place to sit on, eat at, and three flowers from the garden in a water glass. Luxury decorating will always be a luxury, the same way disasters around the world, natural or created by man, have always been happening. This fact will never stop the new super-rich to spend obscene amounts on whatever gives them more perceived status and legitimacy (the Falcones, anyone?), and the decent to find a balance between getting and giving. And while I was still thinking about Lisa Maria's continued attempts to infiltrate old-money circles, I turned the page to pure, serene beauty: a John Saladino-created house.
Deep breath, aware of the Sun's massaging heat on the back of my head. Good-to-the core fabulous architecture and design can do this, and Mr. Saladino is THE MASTER, taking the shout out and instead making houses whisper their sophisticated story. There's no "nouveau"-riche or any other kind in here. Dreamy, painterly (think Vermeer light), happy, and am I coining the term "restrained opulence"?, or "minimalist sensual Romanticism? (OK, this is really pushing it) - all of these can describe his work, with one of my very favorites being the landscape architecture of his (former) home, Villa di Lemma in Montecito, CA. I highly recommend purchasing his 2009 book documenting the creation of this masterpiece. "Villa", written by Mr. Saladino, also includes a DVD with a film by Ethan Boehme and, in addition to Debussy's "Syrinx" for flute, original music by Daniel Lentz. There is just no other book like this one and I hope that by now it is required reading in any design program and, thinking about it, in architecture schools too, and not just because of its author being one of the the most distinguished alumni of the Yale School of Art and Architecture.
Back to the article that took my mind away from greed and pettiness. It depicts Mr. Saladino weaving his art into a Spanish-style Florida house. Yes, the spirit of '20s Mizner is there, but the rest is pure Saladino magic. Above are the pictures that took me away to design Nirvana. Hope they'll do the same for you.
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