Trade Secrets | New England Home | January 2015

Celebrating Fine Design, Architecture, and Building

Gorgeous Grays Make a Chic High-Rise Home A South End Townhouse Mingles Past And Present Plus: ANtiquEs FOr MOdErN liFE ANd tHE JOy OF MixiNG PAttErNs

The New Boston

Diverse, cosmopolitan, yet still historic, the city shows its changing face.

January–February 2015NEHOMEMAG.COM

Who’s doing what, where, and how in the New England design business

House Rules ///////////

By Louis PosteL

T

hey’ve finally laid down the law in Massachusetts. Interior designers are now free.

They can bid on state jobs directly without the sting (and additional markups to clients) of having to subcontract to their sister and brother architects. Although the Feds have long recognized designers, Massachusetts had been holding out. Until now.

Expect to see cutting-edge police stations, casually elegant neighborhood clinics, transitional-style libraries, and everything else looking and feeling a whole lot better.

At last September’s ASID/New England Chapter Annual Meeting, Lisa Bonneville, Elizabeth Swartz, Wayne Southworth, Jeanne Finnerty, Bill Elinoff, presidentelect Cheryl Morrison, and ASID Foundation chair Suzan Globus joined a large turnout at the Boston Design Center’s fifth-floor seminar room. Newton-based designer Christina Oliver, president of the Massachusetts Interior Design Coalition that labored for years to get H.4303 passed, brought rounds of applause from the audience with

the news of its signing by Governor Deval Patrick. What better way to celebrate the induction of Jane Garland Lucas as an ASID Fellow? In a reciprocating and gentle gesture, Lucas brought the evening to a close by giving out heart-shaped stones she’d found on her beach in Maine.

But let’s not get too excited. More than a few celebrants woke in the night with Kafka-esque nightmares of a world in which laws in general and the bureaucracies that enforce them feel increasingly bizarre. What’s the chance of this well-intentioned, long-overdue law emancipating interior designers becoming subject to a still higher law, The Law of Unintended Consequences? Just in the past year, revelations have come out that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration had fallen asleep at the wheel regarding badly designed ignition switches and airbags. The Secret Service let a knife-toting, ammo-packing intruder inside the White House before an off-duty agent tackled him in the East Wing. The Centers for Disease Control passed the Ebola hot potato to a hapless nurse at the first sign of an outbreak. We could go on. But there’s no point in ranting here: laws and bureaucracies are highly immune to ranting, in any case.

Instead, we’d like to propose a new law—call it H.4303B— that puts interior designers and architects in charge of absolutely everything: health, education, aSid Fellow Jane garland lucaS the economy, the environment,

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Breaking down BarrierS Matthew ritchie’s eighteen-month stint as artist-in-residence at the institute of contemporary art, boston culminated in remanance, his abstract mural on the ica’s Sandra and Gerald fineberg Wall. ritchie explores—and transcends—the traditional confines of the medium, extending his brush strokes beyond the wall and onto the adjacent windows. on view though June 2015. Institute of Contemporary art, Boston, 100 Northern ave., Boston, (617) 478-3100, icaboston.org

keep in Touch Help us keep our fingers on the pulse of new england’s design community. Send your news to lpostel@nehomemag.com.

140 New eNglaNd Home january–february 2015

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the military. Because who else is more concerned for the welfare of others? Who else offers creative solutions tailored to individuals, as opposed to demographic blocs? Let designers make the rules. Then, as Confucius suggested, let them lead by example, rather than by enforcing those rules. Citizenship would be a matter of good design. Picture heart-shaped boulders cropping up on the Washington Mall to mark the new era. /// in iTaly, eSpecially

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in Florence and the Peristeropoulou Chianti hills, the Bureaucracy of Design rules alongside its consort, Sustainability. This is according to architect Elpida Peristeropoulou, who should know. Now with Hresko Associates in Boston, Peristeropoulou interned with Italy’s Commission on Architectural and Landscape Heritage for the Province of Florence. “The bureau-

caSTello di acquaBella

cracy is very strict, much more so than Beacon Hill,” says Peristeropoulou. “But at the same time, there’s a huge emphasis on using renewable energy systems, bringing these fifteenth-century structures up to code without interrupting their history— doing it, in other words, invisibly.” A case in point is the restoration of the Castello di Acquabella, where the ingenious new terracotta tiles conceal photovoltaic cells. /// STaying True To

paT ForTunaTo 142 New eNglaNd Home january–february 2015

history isn’t necessarily a law in Florida, as it is in Tuscany.

“I can talk to my clients all day long about coral colors and

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the turquoises of the Caribbean sea, but what they really want is to bring New England along with them,” says designer Pat Fortunato of Orchard Beach, Maine, many of whose clients own second homes in the Sunshine State. “It’s their taste that matters,” Fortunato reminds her design students at the workshop she runs for the Maine College of Art. “They have to love their final choice. My job as a designer is to edit, to check to see that things are truly invoking an emotional response.”

Call this Fortunato’s Law, or H.4303B.1. /// a man well paST eighTy called maSTer

woodcarver Paul White to produce an emotional artifact of his own. “I’d like a coat of arms,” said the caller. “Well, I’m not sure,” White recalls telling him. “I’ve never done a coat of arms.” The octogenarian appeared later with a sketch of a

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coat with six arms sticking out. “So we ended up making it,” said White, “and the man put it on the outside of his house a few years ago.” White, who works out of his studio in Cape Cod’s East Sandwich, may be relatively new to coats of arms, but for everything else he’s recognized as one of the best. In fact, next time you’re in Washington, D.C., you can visit an eagle he carved to be cast in bronze for the entry to the National Archives. /// There are coaTS oF armS and There are

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144 New eNglaNd Home january–february 2015

the arms attached to sconces holding candles. The latter shed light on another design law: Don’t be afraid to riff on the classics. Architects William Adams Delano and Chester Holmes Aldrich had put some beautiful ones in the living room of the circa-1903 High Lawn Estate in Lenox, Massachusetts. Says architect Don Giambastiani of Charlestown, Massachusetts, whose former firm, Solomon + Bauer + Giambastiani Architects, headed up High Lawn’s recently completed three-year restoration. “There were four sconces on each side, but it seemed to me that there were sconces missing on the far ends where there’s a fireplace opposite

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a carved niche. I had been working with Loukas Deimezis at Appleton Lighting in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, for at least twenty-five years, and I asked him to make the additional sconces. They ended

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up as kind of a hybrid. He pirated arms from the five-arm sconces and redid them all as three-arm sconces, making twelve altogether.” /// iF high deSign were The new law oF The

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land, how would designers manage the lawless on the outer margins of civilization—say, six of the loveliest kids in the world whose ages range from one to eight?

“We gave them a side door directly off the garage to a mudroom we designed,” says architect Chris Chu of Newton. “This includes a separate water closet with a urinal in a closed off room for the four boys, who are none too accurate; a big sink for washing kids’ clothes and sports equipment; a pantry for bulk items; and a pintsize potty so no one falls in.” But what this mudroom (currently under construction) is not is dark and paneled. “I am a stickler

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for putting windows in mudrooms, even if it means sacrificing wall space. Light and flow, letting a house breathe—that’s what it’s all about,” says Chu. /// leT ThiS Be known henceForTh aS chu’S

Law. Let houses and the people in them breathe free. Open up dead space to light, air, and the possibilities that lie before us.

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