Trade Secrets from the Premier Issue of New England Home | September 2005
LUNCHES AND HUNCHES
by Louis Postel
Taking the pulse of the very diverse, very busy, low-key but stylish New England design community, where better to start with one of its leading citizens. Bill Hodgins, right at the Café at the Ritz-Carlton in Boston?
The Café is practically Hodgins’s dining room, since he lives and works so close by during the week. With his warm smile, bowtie and unaffected Brahmin bearing he causes a stir and subtle head-turning among the lunch crowd. Hodgins admits he has thought of retiring, but wish so many third-generation clients wanting his unpretentious yet exuberant style, he can’t. “
You ought to check out the work of Lucien Allaire, a wonderful designer,“ he advises, “and Coast, a new shop near my North Shore weekend place. Have you ever been there?”
A few days later Leslie Fine, a fine designer based in Newton, Massachusetts, and I chat about the glamorous life of an interior designer. “How about this for glamour, not to mention adventure?” she asks. “I was taking a new client through the Boston Design Center in search of fabrics and furniture. It was great until one of the local dogs bit my client’s leg! Or how about the day I found myself- in a new Armani suit and Prada shoes-crawling under a client’s backyard deck in search of the cat who got loose during an installation!
On the subject of stylish suits and ungovernable pets, we have a grave confession to make. While shooting our cover story we missed what would have been the photo op of the year designer Anthony Catalfano, looking dashing as usual in his trademark navy suit in a futile attempt to head a dozen of the homeowners’ cows into one of Sam Gray’s photographs. They would have looked so good staring in the window at all those acres of Brunschwig upholstery, and so New England: if only the real herdsman hadn’t been out to lunch.
Designer Linda Banks gives me some ideas for the names of my new column. Banks left Connecticut for Falmouth, Maine, just a few years ago and already her firm is one of the biggest in the state. “I just love the name of an article I once read,” she says. “Tatzling on New York decorators, the piece, Air-oKiss and Tell, ‘was an expose about designers who gauge their clients. My boyfriend had an idea that made us laugh. What do you think of “Rear Window Treatments?”
Whatever I end up calling my columns, I’ll certainly remember Bank’s keen observations. “Clients have many reasons for choosing how much of their disposable income they are willing to commit to the design and decoration of their homes,“ she says. “In certain economic climates, clients starts mourning about their shrinking pocketbooks. They think that if they withhold their true budgets, their design professional might just come up with solutions that cost even less than they might have budgeted. Once, I arrived for a meeting at a client’s house a tad early (pretty rare for me.) Letting myself in, I heard the shower running, but as I waited, I spotted a note on the kitchen table. Unable to avert my eyes, I read the note. “Honey, Linda is on her way over for a meeting. Don’t tell her about the new boat!”
No, the design life is not at all glamour, but for everyone who knows designer Susan Dearborn of Wellesley, Massachussetts, it seems to be the best kind of serious fun. Dearborn reports: “For a French California couple now living in Florida, we are designing a double condo unit in Boston. They wanted it to depict the atmosphere of a 1930’s cruise ship. Challenges include the design of a curved rail-light and wall panel system. The design composition includes gold-beaded and silver mica wall coverings; a kitchen with an iridescent-violet glass mosaic-tile backsplash and silver-glazed cabinets, and textiles include fur and giraffe and ostrich hides, “All aboard, I say.
Susan Turner, in Dublin, New Hamphshire, has aquatic-minded clients as well. Their challenge to her this summer was a 1960s-vintage concrete pool. “We were determined to save it, warming it with charming wrought-iron furniture, antique of course, “Susan told me. “These old pieces are tricky. They can be found, but finding them functional and, yes, practical is another thing altogether. At the antique show in Westport, Connecticut, I stumbled on Iron Rennaissance, which has a vast and delightful collection of original wrought-iron garden furniture: charming chaises, tables, chairs and settees – all in perfect condition. What a selection! You can see it at www.ironrenaissance.com.”
Speaking of great estates, close to home, Boston designer Kathleen Sullivan Elliott’s daughter Kristin Sullivan Egan chose the Great House at the Crane Estate for her recent nuptials. Not only is David Adler’s 1928 Stuart-style mansion at Crane’s Beach a thrilling place to start a marriage, it’s a launch pad for meteoric design career success – which is a long-winded way of saying Kristin will be teaming up with her very accomplished Mom.
The design career of Lisa Newman Paratore of Barrington, Rhode Island, is already quite established, but she’d like to focus our attention on two secret sources on Connecticut’s East Shore who have assisted her in projects. “I just did a room at the Carlisle Show House,” sponsored by “This Old House.” She says. “The room was for a six year-old. The focal point of a bedroom is, of course the bed. John Russell, of Guilford, Connecticut, designed and created a masterpiece specifically for the space, a modified Cinderella pumpkin coach that appeals to the imagination of children and the aesthetic sense of adults.
“The room’s wall treatment is another major point of interest. Marc Potocsky of Branford, Connecticut, started with a piece of silk damask fabric I was using for pillows on the bed and designed a stencil loosely based on the pattern. He stenciled all the walls, they applied a trompe l’oeil treatment that creates the illusion of a sheer floor-to-ceiling voile fabric. The effect is so convincing that people literally touch the walls to make sure that there is nothing more covering them than Benjamin Moore paint. His efforts caught the eye of acclaimed interior designer Charles Spada and won best-in-show recognition by The Boston Globe.”
Every little’s girl’s room is precious. I last saw designer and another Cheryl Katz in a child’s room that she designed, gratis, for a battered-women’s shelter in Dorchester, Massachusetts. The room is as beautiful and fresh as a child’s room in any major show house. Now the Cheryl and Jeffrey Katz Studio is busier than ever. The pair, who just finished a big project on Nantucket, have agreed to be contributing editors to Martha Stewart’s newest publication, Body and Soul. They’re also in the midst of designing Dress, a hip clothing shop on Boston’s Newbury Street, and are designing the kitchen and restoring the rest of the house of superstar chef Barbara Lynch and her husband, Charlie Petri of Nine West.
The design life begins and ends with lunch. This time, I meet architect William Soupcoff at Wentworth by the Sea under the domed ceiling of a dining room once favored by socialites, film stars and presidents. TMS architects, Soupcoff’s firm, helped rescue the New Castle Island, New Hampshire hotel from the wrecker’s hall. The structural engineers maintained that the place was “done for,” but Soupcoff isn’t an MIT grad for nothing.
Soupcoff and his partner, John Merkle, are currently involved in a healthy mix of residential and commercial projects, including Phase 1 of a planned revitalization of the Musica Hall, a Portsmouth, New Hampshire, landmark, a project funded in part by a grant from Save America’s Treasures.
On the residential front, TMS has projects under way in coastal areas of New Hampshire, Maine and Massachusetts, as well as several in New Hampshire’s Lake Winnipesaukee region, including a 17,000-square-foot waterfront estate and boathouse.
And with deep-felt gratitude that we share in this design life, Soupcoff and I proceed to lower our forks into some of the justifiably famous Wentworth meat salads, while silently we hail the spirits of New England design past and present.
You gotta have style.
Memo to Dalia Tamari: Our magazine’s founder, Dan Kaplan, and I thank you for the use of your stunning Poliform showroom at the Boston Design Center for shooting our portraits. Would it be too much to ask if we could simply move in? NEH
KEEP IN TOUCH Help us keep our fingers on the pulse of New England’s design community. Send your news to lpostel@nehomemag.com