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Photography by Alise O'Brien
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In Manhattan, she worked in the hectic art world and came home to a place as pure and stark as a Zen monastery. Modernism kept silence; shunned color. She loved its austerity, in those New York years.
But when she came home to work as an art consultant in St. Louis, she was ready for something a little sexier.
She remembered St. Louis designer David Deatherage, who had made his reputation on the glamorous side of midcentury modern. This aesthetic, trademark of his Century Design Ltd., was neither cold nor silent. It whispered like Garbo, folding silk satins and velvet against the skin. It followed curves, not hard angles; craved gloss and sparkle; set intense colors against modern white.
She and Deatherage had the same Dorothy Draper and Billy Haines books, the same vocabulary, the same French willingness to reinvent surfaces. As a starting point, Deatherage found a dining table attributed to the Parisian design house Maison Jansen. It was light walnut, its glass painted 7UP-bottle green and reverse-etched in gold (the verre églomisé technique). Deatherage had the green stripped and the glass silver-leafed. He found bronze Mastercraft dining chairs and covered them in a coral silk Fireworks print by costume and set designer Tony Duquette for Jim Thompson.
“Even in a formal dining room,” Draper once said, “you don’t want to be ponderous or gloomy.”
The old restraint melted away, the apartment owner added what she loved, like a candelabra on the mantel, a gift to her father from the Shah of Iran; Billy Haines shell tables, murmuring her love of the sea; a Buddha brought back from Bali. Art is everywhere: a Robert Motherwell, a Pablo Picasso self-portrait photograph, a pair of 19th-century Aristide Maillol lithographs her mother had bought in Paris. At William Shearburn Gallery, she found a Donald Baechler suite (it hangs above the sideboard) and rosebushes hand-drawn and printed in layers by Andy Millner. At a Laumeier Sculpture Park gala, she picked up a tiny pen-and-ink on handmade paper: “It’s poison ivy, which I love, because it’s beautiful and dangerous,” she says.
Transformations continued: Deatherage took a ruby brocade–covered chair and had it redone in lavender velvet—keeping the trapunto dagger in its back. He had a 1940s Dorothy Draper sideboard lacquered glossy ivory and aubergine.
In the bedroom, they quoted Draper again, elevating the brown quilted headboard with an ornate wood frame designed by Deatherage and crafted by Custom Furniture Works. The apartment owner stole a Draper mirror from Deatherage’s own guest bedroom. The big bed is softened with a silky, pale blue spread, because “in the bedroom,” Draper said, “comfort should be supreme.”
It accommodates desire.
