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“There are any number of museums in which the architectural signature overwhelms the art,” says collector Ethan Wagner, who, with his wife and business partner, art adviser Thea Westreich, has acquired some 800 objects over 22 years. “If it happens in museums, it can certainly happen in a home.” Yet when Wagner and Westreich needed to reconfigure their loft in New York’s cast iron district, Wagner relinquished his skepticism of architecture’s flash to engage the services of a seasoned professional whose expertise helped the couple elegantly showcase their collection, which rotates through the space pending its move to the Whitney Museum of American Art and Centre Pompidou in Paris starting in 2015.
According to Wagner, architect James Harb brought “a sense of proportion and how space works both for art and life” to the renovation of the 4,000 square feet of living space. “We haven’t seen that kind of sensibility embodied in many residences,” he says. He and Westreich call Harb a genius, high praise from a couple who, having recently published Collecting Art for Love, Money, and More (Phaidon), literally wrote the book on buying and living with art.
Just as the couple counsels care in the selection of those who dole out art advice, collectors would do well to seek the wisdom of designers. The best bring vast experience to planning both formal and comfortable residential spaces that accommodate art. They have developed a variety of tricks, both universal and unique, to address the needs of each client and collection, resulting in distinctive spaces that are far from white cubes.
Harb, the principal of James Harb Architects, consulted with Wagner and Westreich on typical elements such as lighting and establishing maximum wall space—a constant issue for those with objects to hang. Fortunately the couple was amenable to radical interventions: Two fireplaces were enclosed, as were two windows, to gain more surface area. (Another fireplace was left intact, and the top-floor loft had enough remaining windows to keep it flooded with natural light.) Recessed fixtures are a popular choice for art lighting, and during the planning, Harb proffered yet another radical, seemingly counterintuitive alteration. He suggested lowering the ceiling to its current height of 11 feet to level its original slope and provide concealed space for air ducts and light fixtures. Westreich says the move actually created an airier effect throughout the loft, thanks to a universal linearity that keeps the architecture from competing with the art. “Since he made that change, both your eye and mind go to the art uninterrupted,” says Wagner.
“The space welcomes the work, allows it to shine, and be all that it is,” is the way Westreich describes it. As with all classic lofts, the living and dining areas flow into an open kitchen that suits serious cooks who love art. Sean Paul’s appropriation of an Ingres print, composed upside down at an odd angle, wraps the wall above the Sub-Zero refrigerator, while a diptych by John Kelsey and a photograph by Eileen Quinlan offer respite just to the left of the Viking cooktop. “We can sit and read or I can cook my heart out, and we can live a life with our art,” she says.
Places for quiet contemplation are certainly a regular quest for art collectors. In contemporary architecture, that calm is often characterized by minimal lines and the purity of industrial materials. One parochial execution of such structural serenity can be found in architect Richard Meier’s Perry Street Towers, erected on the Hudson River in 2002. The raw spaces offered to original residents were unpartitioned swaths of concrete and glass, walls optional. The challenge issued to architect Ali Tayar, of Parallel Design, by his collector client was to preserve as much of the open plan as possible while extracting display solutions for not only an impressive collection of modern and contemporary masterworks, but also a growing holding of Persian textiles and Art Deco furniture. “The goal wasn’t to create a gallery,” says Tayar. “But we extended the idea of curating from the art to the furniture” to elicit a seamless residential composition.
Fortunately for the client, Tayar excels at devising custom structural elements that connect seemingly disparate existing components. To create distinct living areas, the architect designed movable panels that swing back and forth to reveal the adjoining spaces to or conceal them from the main living area. To warm the cool building materials, he sheathed the surfaces in zebrawood veneer, but he left the plywood edges showing. “The whole apartment has a high-low feeling,” says the architect. The panel in front of the den holds Damien Hirst’s Beautiful pop spinning ice creamy, whirling, expanding painting, 1995, while the bathroom is located behind Richard Prince’s Cowboy, 2000.
A drywall partition was required for the bachelor collector’s Sol LeWitt Series,Part III, #12A + B, 1969. The wall drawing required an expertly planed and skimmed surface, and to make matters more exacting, the apartment’s sunset view meant any imperfection would be glaringly obvious on a daily basis. Tayar’s confidence in his contractor was rewarded with a flawless ground for LeWitt’s work.
Carl Andre’s Almanta, 2000, which was acquired during the project, rests on the balcony. He had sandstone inlays milled for the outdoor floor to best show the piece. “It’s a natural stone that complements the structure’s concrete and glass balustrades and the work’s cast metal,” the architect explains.
Tayar continued to warm the apartment with bronze, which rings the bottoms of the concrete structural columns and was used for the kitchen hardware. “It was machined, but not sealed, to maintain a natural patina,” he says. He used a polished version of the material in his design of custom bathroom sconces that set off bare bulbs at odd angles. In a happy coincidence, the client happens to own Jasper Johns’s lithograph Lightbulb, 1976. “We never really talked about it,” says Tayar, “but one day I came in and found it installed.” Call it a quietly contemplative nod of approval.
Wall space was not an issue for a couple who acquired a Park Avenue perch to shelter both their young family and a collection of work primarily by contemporary stars. Indeed, the prewar property’s configuration—a warren of variously sized rooms—would remain a constant obstacle for architect Martin Finio, who runs Christoff & Finio Architecture with his wife, Taryn Christoff. Because the co-op board restricted the number of amendments to the original floor plan, the design team had to concentrate on removing niches and being certain the proliferation of walls lined up and were evenly skimmed. “It’s a clean design in which all the lines are perfect,” says one of the collectors, “which is no small feat in an apartment originally designed for smaller paintings in gilded frames. They really had to fit a square peg in a round hole.”
The trick was opening the layout’s transitional components “in a way to make it feel connected,” says Finio. Because art will rotate as the collection grows, lighting and alignment had to establish every wall as fair territory for two- and three-dimensional objects as well as digital work. Recessed ceiling fixtures were placed in a calculated spread to maintain even lighting for anything on or against the wall.
The interior is also one in which children live with art. “I grew up with a father who is collector,” says the client, “and we like exposing our kids, fostering the next generation of art lovers.” Accordingly, Florian Maier-Aichen’s untitled C-print of a brilliantly colored coastline, from 2005, hangs in the playroom, while Micah Lexier’s A Minute of My Time (August 30, 1998 12:40–12:41), 1998, and Vik Muniz’s Double Elvis (Pictures of Chocolate), 1999, grace two of the three children’s rooms. Of course, mishaps can occur. In the living room, Table Rose, an unsealed acrylic cocktail table by Yves Klein from a posthumous 1963 edition, the interior of which is dusted with pink pigment, has suffered a few unfortunate knocks. “You have to have a sense of humor,” the client says.
Reflecting a trend among collectors engaged in interiors projects, the client says, “We wondered how to do something different with the gallery hall.” By coincidence she came across the mural-size wall collages by the collective Assume Vivid Astro Focus during construction and bought Butch Queen 4.4, 2010, as a birthday present for her husband. “This was the perfect solution,” she says. Finio and Christoff were assigned to send the exact dimensions to the artists for fabrication, but more details had to be worked out. Because the piece runs the length of one side of the hallway and turns a corner to wrap a bedroom doorframe, the decision was made for the piece to respond to the wall rather than simply having the wall accommodate the art. “There’s a great conversation between the art and the structure and its quirks,” says Finio. A gap, known as a reveal, distinguishes the mural from the floor plane, while another reveal around the frame differentiates the picture from the structure, allowing the art crucial autonomy. “It’s the small details,” adds Finio. “It doesn’t take a lot, but they really set the piece off significantly.”
Coordinated planning of architecture and a work in progress was also vital in Christoff & Finio’s work for a collector couple building a home on the eastern end of Long Island. The clients approved the architects’ design for a two-part structure, clad largely in black-stained cedar that featured a foyer separate from the main living spaces of the house. The design called for a glass-enclosed ground-floor entry with a minimal interior containing little more than a terrazzo-ground concrete staircase with a solid granite railing leading up to the rest of the house, and a mechanical room. The architects had yet to find the right exterior treatment for the mechanical room when the clients, with their art adviser Sima Familant, decided to commission Jenny Holzer to create a piece for the entry.
“Of course, she was given the choice to interact with the space in any way she wanted,” says Finio. But the architects secretly hoped the artist would see the opportunity of the mechanical room exterior. In a perfect melding of architect and artist minds, Holzer approached the room entirely of her own volition, choosing to wrap it in one of her signature text pieces of sometimes blank, sometimes profound aphorisms rolled out in scrolling lights.
The heavy lifting began as Holzer’s studio team, the electronic engineers, the mechanical team, and the architects all worked in tandem to design and fabricate the piece. Some 600 10-foot-tall, 1½-inch-deep fins, fitted with vertical sets of LEDs, were locked together in a toothlike configuration and fastened to the walls with cleatlike devices, making them appear to float off the surface. “We all wanted the piece to be as seamless a part of the architecture when the lights were off as when they were on, so we agreed to give the fins a metallic powder-coat finish that would catch the natural light when off,” says Finio. Holzer’s selection of the mechanical room was fortuitous as it easily accommodates the cables and computer equipment that attend the piece, but a few of the fins had to accommodate the heating and cooling vents originally designed into the walls. The door required to access the mechanicals is seamless. “You would never find the door if it weren’t pointed out to you,” says Finio.
Reflecting on the mind-set of the current breed of architects who welcome a constant dialogue with artists and artworks, Finio says, “We are always trying to create spaces, surfaces, and situations that might inspire a specific way for art to engage with it. Architecture can suggest a specific artistic intervention, just as a particular work of art might dictate a specific architectural response.” No doubt even Ethan Wagner would approve.
This article appears in the July 2013 issue of Art+Auction.