WITH THE GREATEST OF EASE
Author and interior designer Maureen Footer opened her book-talk about the legendary George Stacey at the ICA last week by making a distinction between style and chic. Chic, she explained, was spontaneous and not belabored. It’s a quality that’s notoriously difficult to achieve in both exterior and interior architecture, which require substantial time and labor, but one that Stacey brought to all his commissions. In the dining room of the Levy House in Palm Springs, for example, Stacey sets a baroque Italian stone transom over a sleek moderne fireplace, and playful flamingo-pink upholstered chairs beneath neo-Gothic blackened steel candelabras. He paints the wall a creamy white and bookends the entire arrangement with giant-sized potted ferns that look as if they’ve just been carried inside from the patio.
Interiors are by nature ephemeral, as they are transformed to best serve the changing lives of their inhabitants. But there’s something particularly immediate about Stacey’s work, which always looks fresh, and just a pinch underdone, with splashes of open space and bright light throughout. It’s as if the room arrived all in a moment, like a happy explosion. There’s no doubt that this sensibility requires a lot of work from the designer to get right, so that it feels unified. But it leaves a feeling – improvisational, unorthodox, free – that’s deeply modern and deeply American.
Dining Room, Levy House, Palm Beach, by George Stacey. Image courtesy of Rizzoli.