Park Place
The architect Paul Florian lives large in a small apartment on the Gold Coast
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Contrast comes from the oak floors, once blond and now brown-black, and furniture in creams and whites. An oak day bed from the forties that belonged to Florian's maternal grandmother and a reproduction of a Florence Knoll sofa define a corner of the living room. The steel-and-laminate coffee table and end table by George Nelson are from Modern Times. The chairs are modern but all different. "I tend to buy one of each thing that I like to look at," Florian says. "These are mostly junk-store finds." Among them are chairs by Charles and Ray Eames, Harry Bertoia, and Zanotta.
To anchor the dining area, diffuse light, and diminish the impact of the buildings across the street, Florian suspended an acrylic cabinet from steel cables in front of a window to the east. "I am interested in the furnished window," he explains, "an idea first explored by the Italian architect and designer Gio Ponti in response to the glass curtain walls of modernism." Among the objects furnishing the cabinet are postwar aluminum bud vases and a lighter, a sculpture from Bali, a photograph of the entry to the zoo in Rome, and a hammered-copper creamer from Sawbridge Studios.
Hanging from cables in front of a window at the far end of the room is a drawing that Florian did when he was in the architecture master's program at the University of Illinois at Chicago. "The project was for a school in a park," Florian says. "I did it in memory of the British landscape tradition of huge follies in private parks."
The gray-blue inner wall holds a credenza in black chrome by Paul Evans. Above it is a portrait of a great-uncle of Florian's from the sixties-an elegant man with high cheekbones, gray hair, and a mustache, he wears a brightly colored, open-collared shirt. "Emilio Bolognesi," Florian says. "He was kind of a ladies' man." (And, judging from his looks, a great success.) Beside the portrait are framed lithographs from Chicago's 1933 Century of Progress exhibition, a gift from a friend. The hand-hammered silver cigar box on top of the credenza, Florian believes, was a retirement gift for his maternal grandfather, Giulio Bolognesi, the Italian consul general in the city. The signatures engraved inside include a McCormick and a Field. "He was a popular guy, and that's his crest on top," Florian says. "He was a count. They're a dime a dozen in Italy, but he had one of those dimes."
Another vignette in the front hallway, brightened by an accent of Persian red, features a satinwood English Sheraton writing desk that belonged to Florian's mother, two silver angels from Peru, and a 1910 portrait of his maternal grandfather, at that time a consular official in Lima. He is an imposing figure in a white suit with a looping scar on one cheek. "He was in a duel," Florian explains. "The story goes that it was over whether a train window would stay opened or closed."
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In the living room, an acrylic cabinet suspended by cables holds postwar aluminum objects, a sculpture from Bali, pottery, and an inlaid Japanese box. The cabinet was intended to anchor the dining area, diffuse light, and diminish the impact of the building across the street without reducing the airiness of the curtain wall. |
A wall in Florian's bedroom holds pastels from the eighties by Tom Wasik and works inherited from his family-a 17th-century botanical still life, an 18th-century portrait of a relative in Austrian dress. The furnishings in the room are spare. Behind the bed and against the opposite wall are simple white cabinets-inexpensive off-the-rack kitchen cabinets. "They're usually used over refrigerators, so they have a low proportion," Florian says. "I just lined them up. I've had them in four apartments, and sometimes I stack them." Beside his bed are a yellow fiberglass chair by Charles and Ray Eames and a tall standing bookshelf from Design Within Reach filled from top to bottom with art and architecture books-an impos-ing tower that marks an amusing counterpoint to Florian's innate sense of order.
And apparently he sees no great distinction between poetry and design, either. One recent morning there was a collection of poems by Anna Akhmatova on his kitchen counter. "She never left the Soviet Union," Florian says. "She insisted on staying. Some of the poems are really beautiful. They're romantic but quite crisp, and she talks a lot about landscape. So all the lighting I did is new. . . ."
Photography by Barbara Karant, photo styling by Diane Ewing
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