We’re very proud of our record of locating Architects With a Sense of Humor for the HOUSE column and Joan Dineen is definitely one of them. Up until a few years ago, she says she would have done anything to avoid an interview but she is, by her own admission, a late bloomer and we talked a lot about finding confidence later on in life. Her home is beautifully and skillfully designed despite her new, gawky, adorable rescue puppy’s best efforts to chew through most of it. Joan seems philosophical. “When I was young, I was always looking for the meaning in life … and it’s this … here she is.”
You’re hidden! There’s nothing on you anywhere—the only thing I could find was that you were married in a Quaker ceremony. Why are you so hidden?
I’m shy!
You can’t be shy! You run your own business!
… well that has made it a challenge! It actually has. I’m a very late bloomer. I’ve only just come out of my deep shy pain in the last five or so years. And I’m now learning to really enjoy meeting people and talking to them—I’m not terrified.
Is that why you initially went into engineering? [something we did actually find out.]
No, I went into engineering because I really needed to take a break from architecture and my mom and dad got very angry when I said I wanted to take a year off. And we had just had a rapprochement—you know I’d been, like, a rebellious adolescent—and I didn’t want to break their hearts again. I just didn’t have the energy.
But engineering doesn’t sound much easier.
I was looking for certainty. I wasn’t quite sure what architecture meant on a deeply moral and philosophical basis in terms of what creativity was and what borrowing was. I was really confused about innovation and creativity and mining the past. You know I was seventeen and there was that heroic modernism where each problem defined the right solution and each problem was unique. I took that so deeply, deeply, deeply as catechism and was terribly afraid to ever do anything I’d ever seen anybody else do before. It was cheating! And that’s absurd but I was seventeen …
And so after engineering at Cornell, you went on to Columbia to finish architecture …
And then I got a job for two years at I.M. Pei.
Well, that’s very impressive …
Oh, I’m so impressive, thank you.
You’re so intimidating …
Thank you! Thank you very much! I like that! [laughing]
What’s to be said for being a late bloomer?
Well … I’m having fun. If we’re lucky we get a little better in some ways as we get older … and if we’re really not lucky, we get more the way we were.
Was it success that changed things?
I don’t know. Yes … no. Yes … no.
Professional confidence and competence then?
I think that’s exactly right. You learn that you can actually do what you’re pretending to do. Oddly enough one of the most fun things that we’ve done was to do Kips Bay this year. It’s not that it’s done anything amazing for our business yet, although one hopes, it was more of a personal thing, just fun.
Yes, perhaps an absence of anxiety leads to real creativity. You don’t have to be anxious in order to do something well.
Right. I have found that when designing and decorating, particularly for myself, very hard because there are no excuses … [whispers] except money! But by having confidence I’ve learned to take pleasure in it all.
And then you take more risks, maybe.
You take more risks. I used to go out of my way to avoid situations like this [interview]. I had a partnership and part of why I had the partnership was because my partner was very outgoing and I could hide behind him … but you know that’s a double-edged sword.
It just seems so incredibly hard to go from being an architecture school graduate at an entry level position to establishing your own business. It’s a tough and crowded field, isn’t it?
You know I was very lucky in a lot of ways. I’ve never had the big, huge, fancy projects but I’ve always had nice, solid projects and solid people. From my very first client—and this has never happened again—I think I got ten clients. And I still do work for that first client … and let us say that was a long time ago … I don’t even want to tell you how long ago that was! And I was also trying to balance children … my husband is very participatory in that.
Is he an architect as well?
No, he publishes plays. It’s very boutique.
That sounds like a job from the 19th century. Do you mean he produces the plays?
No. When you publish a play you do really two things, you print a script in whatever format and you sell that script either to bookstores or to people. And then the other side of it is that you license production rights to various categories of performance. Like, Tony Kushner’s Angels In America—that’s probably the best known of the plays that he publishes—and so when colleges or community theaters or professional theaters outside of New York want to do it, they contact him.
Are lots of people busy writing plays?
Oh my … every dentist has one. So many people feel they have story they want to tell … oh … I do know some incredibly smart, fabulous dentists … that was such a bad thing to say … but you know, lawyers [write plays] too, especially lawyers!
We’ll dig you out of this … okay, so I once had a friend who is an architect and we hired her to do our apartment—and we are still friends but there were moments when it might have foundered. What’s your take on working for friends? Would you say yes to a friend who needed an architect?
I’ve actually designed for a lot of friends. I get so much pleasure out of it. I’m actually doing [a design] for my husband’s ex-girlfriend.
Gosh, you must be very tactful.
Oh, I love her. She’s one of the people I respect most. And working with her has given me this window on her worldview and it’s fantastic. I love it! But it is actually rare that someone strikes you with such powerfully positive revelations.
But it can be very fraught.
I’ve had fraught … but not from friends of mine. Oddly, friends of friends can be a big danger zone. I don’t know why. It’s neither one thing or the other. This business is so intimate.
If someone asks you to characterize your style, what do you say? I read one of the few things online about you and you said, “I have a weakness for large and rich things.”
I do! I don’t do “little” [says in little girl’s voice]. I’m absolutely fine with small spaces but my feeling is that you’re going to have more impact in a small space with one big painting on the wall rather than lots of small things.
Why do so many people these days want their houses to look like hotels?
Oh, well yes. We encounter that frequently. There’s that luxury-travel thing, definitely. When you go on vacation and have a nice time, don’t you ever want to move to that city? I do. When you are on vacation especially … you’re taken care of. And it’s pristine. A lot of people are not looking for the quirky.
Well, I suppose quirky people don’t really want to have designer.
Exactly.
Are you a reader or a TV watcher?
I watch Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert and that is really it. I don’t read very many novels but I do like them when they’re good. I spent several months reading Infinite Jest [by David Foster Wallace] this year. And when I finished, I was angry at it … but then oddly, I when I finished I wanted to start all over again.
Why were you angry at it?
It was just so self-satisfied, so swaggering, almost adolescent male quality … and I don’t play tennis.
