Innehållsförteckning för Spring 2020 från MILIEU

One of the great gifts in life is work. Moreover, when that work really speaks to your innate talents, the results are especially pronounced. Not only will you be satisfied with your work, but so will everyone who experiences it. Every interior designer, furniture maker, industrial designer, curator, architect, and artist we feature in our pages has a recognized talent. I do think that the best form of leisure is to do the work you love. MILIEU celebrates the creativity. When we first saw, for instance, the beautiful watercolor paintings of houses by Michael Imber, a prolific San Antonio architect, we wanted to highlight them in our pages. Cris Briger, who runs a successful antiques gallery in Florida, has an uncanny eye for finding new treasures wherever she goes, particularly…

IRISH HOSPITALITY Set on 600 acres in the Irish midlands, Ballyfin, built in the 1820s by Sir Charles and Lady Caroline Coote, remained a family seat for a century until it became a boys’ school for some seventy-odd years. By 2002, though, Chicago businessman Fred Krehbiel bought the property with the idea to turn it into a hotel. For the next nine years, workers restored moldings and floors, fixed the roof, and rebuilt the conservatory. London-based interior designer Colin Orchard deployed period color schemes, textiles, and wallpaper designs to luxuriant effect. Landscape designer Jim Reynolds reestablished walled gardens and created a Neoclassical folly. The result is both grand and intimate, a five-star domain offering fine dining, spa treatments, and activities ranging from clay pigeon shooting to falconry. —Jeff Book ART…

Liz Jaff does something to her completed artworks that likely no other artist anywhere does. Once she has meticulously cut her repeating patterns of white paper, folded them into shapes, sometimes sewing the pieces together with thread, and displayed them, her next act of creation is even more startling. “After I take the work down from a gallery space, perhaps within a week, I destroy it,” she says. “It never exists again.” Just as the act of creating the works is a kind of meditative ritual she practices in her Brooklyn studio, so, too, is the act of destroying, or what she prefers to call “recycling.” “I’ve conducted fire ceremonies, sometimes I’ve had cutting ceremonies where I will cut the works into pieces so fine they become dust.” But the…

FOR MANY YEARS, Beverly Jacomini operated a thriving, Houston-based interior design practice, but dreamt of owning a place where she could retreat and furnish her own home. “My husband and I had three children,” she says, “and I wanted a place in the country. I wanted to have a garden, and to be able to can preserves and get back to nature.” Soon after she and her husband, Tom, began looking, they purchased a large, bare parcel of land adjacent to a lake in the Winedale area near Round Top, Texas. Since then, the town has become famous as the site for one of the nation’s best-known antiques shows, as well as a choice destination for Houstonians seeking a second home, without the hours-long drive west into Hill Country. “When…

COVER Produced by: Katrin Cargill, katrincargill.com. Photography: Jan Baldwin, pearsonlyle.co.uk. Background painted by: Tabby Riley using Mylands Paint, tabbyriley.co.uk, mylands.com. Jennings bath in a custom color with antique taps, THE WATER MONOPOLY, thewatermonopoly.com. FROM THE DESK OF… Page 26 (Clockwise from top left) The Mbarq Collection daybed left, DEDON, dedon.de. La Provençal 800 cooking range, L’ATELIER PARIS, leatelierparis.com. The Tuileries sofa shown in Regency Swirl, a Duro Olowu for Soane Britain fabric, SOANE BRITAIN, soane.co.uk. Clio Sawn Oak dresser handmade by New Orleans workshop Doorman for Sunday Shop, DOORMAN, doormandesigns.com. Oyster More Moiré stripe fabric, PERENNIALS, perennialsfabrics.com. Berlin coffee table, KERRY JOYCE ATELIER, kerryjoyce.com. Page 27 (Clockwise from top left) Gusto Starburst mirror, CASA GUSTO, getthegusto.com. Paul Mathieu Reflet Chandelier, LUXURY LIVING GROUP, luxurylivinggroup.com. Latticework sphere on pedestal, ACCENTS OF…

Pam Sessions Pam Sessions is co-owner and president of Hedgewood Homes in Atlanta. Her company develops neighborhoods, designs and builds new houses, and manages upscale furnished rental homes. Sessions received her BFA degree from the University of Georgia. Upon graduation, she studied photography with Ansel Adams and Dave Bohn. Her company is a full-service design-build company that provides architecture and interior design, as well as land planning and landscape design. Cris Briger When Cris Briger opened her antiques business, Casa Gusto, in West Palm Beach, Florida, she was intent on stocking it with antiques, objects, and artworks that are immediately “provocative.” Her space is filled with goods old and new, most of which are purchased on Briger’s regular buying trips to Europe. She also heads her own namesake full-service design…

San Miguel de Allende is hardly a traveler’s secret, but I do want to share what keeps me coming back. As for my ability to speak Spanish, San Miguel and its inhabitants are forgiving, and one can get through with a handful of words on a short visit. Situated fourteen kilometers (about nine miles) outside of San Miguel de Allende is the Sanctuary of Atotonilco, the first stone for which was laid in 1740. The building’s exterior is defined by largely unadorned curves and cupolas that look as though they grew from the ground. The structure occupies a rare colorless landscape, where even the trees, with their sepia-toned foliage, add to the severity of the scene. Inside, however, is a wonder: a Mexican Baroque mural by Antonio Martínez de Pocasangre,…

Architect Michael Imber has painted thousands of watercolors—poetic scenes that display soft, finely-honed architectural details, vibrant, inventively blended colors, and a keen eye for texture, line, and luminosity. But he rarely shares them with anyone. Displaying, he notes, is not the point. It’s about digging into a building or a place, and really being there. And not just recording something, but understanding it, and bringing his own humanity to it. “You’re forcing yourself to really see what you’re drawing—all your senses come alive,” says Imber, whose San Antonio practice, Michael G. Imber Architects, creates traditional designs across North America. “You’re smelling the sage of the plain or the dampness of the river below your feet or the heat of the sun on your back, or the wind.” Imber started creating…

NESTLED AMID PASTURES and wooded grounds peppered with century-old oaks near the Appalachian foothills in North Georgia, the weekend home of Pam Sessions and her husband, Don Donnelly, possesses much of the charm of the nearby historic houses. But inside the dwelling, every room is laid out and finished to accommodate a thoroughly contemporary lifestyle. “We wanted the interiors to reflect who we are and how we live today,” says Sessions. “At the same time, we wanted to pay homage to the elaborate nineteenth-century mansions around us.” As the founders of Hedgewood Homes, a company that designs and builds custom homes and plans entire neighborhoods, both husband and wife have mastered the art of creating houses that reflect both the personalities and pragmatic needs of their owners. So when they…

YOU’RE HAVING A DINNER PARTY WITH THREE HISTORICAL FIGURES. WHO’S AT THE TABLE? Cecil Beaton, Lord Byron, Vita Sackville-West. FAMOUS FIGURES OF THE PRESENT YOU'D INCLUDE? Wes Anderson—I would ask him where does he come up with those fantastical and unexpected color palettes? And Tilda Swinton, who has an ethereal magic about her. ARTWORKS YOU NEVER TIRE OF? David Hockney’s drawings. SIX PERFECT LONDON SITES? Sir John Soane’s Museum; Dennis Severs’ House, an old silk weaver’s home in Spitalfields; shopping on Lamb’s Conduit Street, where architect Ben Pentreath and Bridie Hall have their shop; lunch at Noble Rot; an opera at the Coliseum or Royal Opera House; a walk along the Thames and dinner at The River Café. A PLACE TO WHICH YOU WANT TO TRAVEL? American cowboy country, replete…

A few years ago, while on a visit to my home in Normandy, my friend Lady H. presented me with three handmade British dish mops. I may have previously hinted to her that I had been longing for such a thing. Finally, I possessed a mop with the quality, utility, and obvious durability that I desired and needed. Her gift led me in pursuit of other “below stairs” (i.e., servants’ work areas) British-made household products of simple, utilitarian beauty that I admire. Last summer while visiting Lady H. at her home in Kent, her son, Simon, and I drove to the nearby town of Hastings, a lively, if a bit down-at-the-heels locale of Tudor origins and mixed charm on the southeast coast in East Sussex. After lunch and a long…

George Nakashima (1905–1990) developed his lifelong interest in woodworking and furniture making as an architecture student at the University of Washington, in the 1920s. He later earned his Masters in Architecture from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After graduating, he went abroad, spending a year in France, then he traveled to India and Japan, where he worked with architects and carpenters to learn the traditional craft of furniture making. While in Tokyo, he was hired by Antonin Raymond, an architect who had previously worked with Frank Lloyd Wright. By the early 1940s, Nakashima had returned to Spokane, intent on setting up his own architectural practice. However, after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, he and his family were sent to the Minidoka War Relocation Center in Hunt, Idaho. While his family…

AMY MEIER LIKES her homes to tell a story, to reveal a narrative about the family who lives there. “To me,” says the California-based interior designer, “a successful design is partly about creating a home where anyone, upon entering, can quickly understand something about the people who live there.” Meier feels the rooms themselves and the objects within them tell guests and visitors a lot of things about the homeowners, and that the aesthetic choices they make allow others to “read between the lines.” Meier strives for balance in her selection of materials and in how she typically designs in layers, combining something rough with something smooth, while pairing formal and casual elements to create visual tension and a sense of the unexpected. Meier recently helped create a story for…