Amaze Me!

In Regency Redux: High Style Interiors: Napoleonic, Classical Moderne, and Hollywood Regency, author Emily Eerdmans mentions an anecdote in which couturier to the stars Adrian commissioned Tony Duquette to design his Beverly Hills dress salon. And the directive that Adrian gave Duquette was really quite simple- "Amaze me". How fabulous is that? I'm sure that for many of you designers, these two little words uttered by a client might be like manna from heaven. It's a directive that gives the designer license to pull out all of the stops and unleash the full force of one's creativity. But I suppose it's also a command that is fraught with uncertainty and that just might provoke stage freight.

I've been thinking about this story for a few weeks now because I would love to tell certain people "Amaze me"- my shoe salesperson at Neiman Marcus, my general contractor, and my hair stylist, for example (and all three are pretty fantastic so I feel confident that they could do so.) But in terms of design, sometimes you see an interior and you can just tell that the designer felt compelled to give the client something ultra special and well, amazing. I wonder if this might have been the case in the following interiors (and a garden too).


The Paris apartment of Charles de Beistegui, c. 1933. Designed by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, the apartment featured this stunning cement staircase painted blue and white. Note too the crystal rail.


The entrance hall at Sa Torre Cega, Cala Ratjada, Mallorca, Spain. Carlos Ortiz-Cabrera of Maison Jansen was responsible for the Pop Art looking, trompe l'oeil painted floor in the foyer.



The Madrid bathroom of the Duchess of Alba, designed by Armand Rateau, c. 1925. The bath was carved from a single piece of white marble, and the walls were covered in gold lacquer with pastoral type scenes.


Landscape design can be used to amaze too, as seen here in the park of Mimi Pecci-Blunt's Paris home, c. 1926.

Images at top: The ultra chic, ultra glam studio of Adrian, designed by Tony Duquette