Park Place
The architect Paul Florian lives large in a small apartment on the Gold Coast
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A 1910 portrait of Florian's maternal grandfather (left) hangs in the entryway above an English Sheraton writing desk that belonged to his mother. A shelf holds a Japanese bronze. At right are two silver angels from Peru. In the living room (right), above a credenza by Evans from Wright, is a sixties portrait of Florian's great uncle. The chair by Charles and Ray Eames was a junk-shop find. | |
An eight-story building by Lucien Lagrange that was completed to the east of Florian's in 2003, however, is a change for the better, he says, an improvement over the declining structure that was there before. And the park and playground beside it are still intact. A gardener, Florian prefers being on a lower floor, in a corner, where the view of the park is so near that it seems as if that ideal urban spot could be his alone.
The interior of Florian's apartment is intimate in its own way and not simply due to its small size. His precision as an architect, his attention to scale, colors, and materials-talents usually summoned for the much larger projects of his clients-coalesce here. (Perhaps his firm should use this space as its own variation on a model apartment.) Within is a fascinating and highly personal collection of art, furniture, and objects-family portraits and mementos, finds by Florian from antiques and junk shops, works of his own design. This is an excellent example of home as autobiography.
One of the reasons that Florian chose the apartment is that readying the backdrop for his visual memoir would not be an overwhelming endeavor. "It was relatively cleaned up for a building of this period," he says. "It had a new curtain wall"-the black louvers were long gone.
A previous owner had redone the kitchen, so it was not necessary to start from scratch on that. To make the space more open and sculptural in feeling, Florian removed some walls and doors and reconfigured others. Concealing hardware such as thermostats in closets made the three rooms-kitchen, living and dining room, and bedroom-quieter and sleeker.
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In the bedroom (above and below), off-the-rack kitchen cabinets conceal most of the books; near drawings by Florian and a photograph, a tower holds other volumes. The two pastels at left on the wall beside the bed (below) are by the former Chicago artist Tom Wasik; in the center is a relative in Austrian dress, and at right is the 18th-century Venetian playwright Carlo Goldoni. |
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Florian painted a partial wall in the living room gray-blue to echo the hues of the lake and the sky. "I like the idea of creating balance on the inside," he explains. "Blue often recedes to the eye, so it adds some life without crowding a space." The wall next to it, in the dining area, is a calm Naples yellow. "There's sun on the periphery, but I wanted to bring light in to the interior," Florian says. Adding to those unities are the buffs and pinks of the concrete columns on the perimeter of the apartment and the granite countertops in the kitchen. Silvery gray-greens appear in the Chinese silk rug in the living room and in the round dining table, a Florian design from the eighties.
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