High Art
Just off the Magnificent Mile, two collectors transform a space formerly occupied by the French restaurant Ciel Bleu into a duplex penthouse with views from every room—home is where the art is.
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The floors in the public areas-library, living and dining rooms, kitchen, and powder room-are Brazilian walnut, with thin inserts of nickel. "After space planning," the wife says, "our concern was how to make this a 21st-century apartment. Materials were very important to us. Using the nickel looked toward the future but referred to the past. We wanted new materials, or old materials worked in new ways."
The hallway leading from the entry to the living and dining rooms is wide enough to accommodate a group of art aficionados on a house tour-or the promenade of a larger party-size crowd. At the time this project was under way, glass that could convert from opaque to clear with the flip of a switch had just become available in floor-to-ceiling panels, and to brighten the hallway, Wheeler and Jones suggested using it for the outer walls of the library. Inspired by Pierre Chareau's Maison de Verre in Paris, Wheeler designed tall metal shelves for the room to hold the couple's collection of art books; a framework of sycamore spans the inner walls and the ceiling-a U-shaped liner that reappears in the kitchen and the powder room. "This does remarkable things for the apartment," says the client. "It warms it up tremendously. And the doorways are wide. So we have defined spaces, but they're not very enclosed. We tried to do two things at once."
Jones designed a sofa for the room and had it covered in gray-green cashmere. To make a coffee table, the owners topped a wrought-iron base found in Europe with cast glass. Across from a pair of Jean-Michel Frank club chairs that were reupholstered in soft sheepskin is a high-backed 1930s French train chair from the Alan Koppel Gallery. High on a shelf, at rest for the moment, is the metronome to which Man Ray affixed a photograph of a former lover's eye. On a tour through the apartment, the owners complement each other as they talk about their collections, imparting biograph- ical information about the artists, historical context, methods, and meaning.
"This is by a French artist named Guy Limone," the husband says, pausing in front of a series of ledges in the hallway lined with tiny figures reminiscent of plastic toy soldiers. "There are 1,000 pieces here. Six of them are red, and the statement was, in the year 2000, when he made this piece, out of every 1,000 people in the world, six had AIDS. Sadly, the number is probably higher today. But what's amazing about this is that no two figures are the same."
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The self-portrait by Eva Hesse, near the entrance to the kitchen, the wife explains, came from the Richard Gray Gallery and was a gift to the artist's psychiatrist-and, judging from the image, perhaps an admission that all was not well. There is even space here for do-it-yourself art. In the kitchen, a Wheeler design in stainless steel, sycamore, and marble, sections of two walls are slate. Supplied with colored chalk and erasers, the grandchildren are free to experiment.
The large room to the north, overlooking the Oak Street Beach, was tricky to plan, Jones says. Included in the 26-by-52-foot space are the living and dining rooms, as well as music and game-table areas. "We wanted to define major seating groups, rather than letting this be a sea of furniture," Jones explains. She achieved an arrangement that was distinctive and fluid, with regions subtly demarcated by the placement of a pair of tall arcing lamps, a Rulhmann sideboard, a low, curving bookshelf by Pierre Chareau. To provide the flexibility for entertaining that the owners required, Jones designed a round dining table with leaves that fold out from the center, a set of chairs covered in pony skin, and a day bed in raffia, just the right height for perching and, uninhabited, for not obscuring the view. To provide extra seating, extensions and supports were fabricated for an art deco desk from Rita Bucheit, and the windowsills were lowered and widened to accommodate guests.
To compensate for the lack of wall space, the owners display some works in the room on easels bought from the late dealer B. C. Holland. At intervals Jones installed silk curtains in a dark olive black and a charcoal gray as a backdrop for frames. A midnight blue painting by Yves Klein and a Francis Bacon study for a portrait of his lover John Edwards are two of the large-scale works here, although the couple routinely lend art to exhibitions, so the arrangements are never fixed for long.
Jones was unaware of the couple's enameled cigarette cases when she designed a coffee table for this room with upper and lower tiers of glass-a perfect place for the collection. The couple do not smoke; they appreciate the boxes solely for their artistry-whether the images are biblical or secular, abstract or figurative.
"We started with plain ones that had moiré patterns," the husband explains. "And then we got into some scenes, and then we got into nude or seminude women-what you might call pinup pictures."
"Odalisques," says his wife.
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