DAVID PATRICK COLUMBIA'S
Guest Diary• September 29, 2023

Revenge, Redemption, and Refuge

Lee Fryd takes in the last couple events of the season out east, including a small dinner party for a new docu about a 20-something phenomenon; and a luncheon and lecture on Black female ornamental horticulturists. A fascinating history of style, color and beauty...

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Friday, August 24, 2007

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Michele Oka Doner

House• August 24, 2007.
Michele Oka Doner is justly known for her exquisitely beautiful public commissions such as the ‘Radiant Site’ at  the Herald Square subway station and ‘A Walk on the Beach’, at the Miami International Airport, as well numerous pieces that have found their way into private collections the world over. Her governing passions are the strange ... READ MORE

Friday, August 17, 2007

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Fairfax & Sammons

House• August 17, 2007.
Anne Fairfax and Richard Sammons live in a little house in the Village that once belonged to Armand Hammer, the flamboyant (and highly controversial) industrialist and art collector. There can’t be a house anywhere that has had two such contrasting sets of owners. Where Hammer’s taste ran to leopard prints and gaudiness, theirs is an essay [&h... READ MORE

Friday, August 10, 2007

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Tord Boontje

House• August 10, 2007.
Tord Boontje, the designer is unusually well known. Even if you do not know his name, chances are you will recognize his distinctive, delicate, and at times, edgy work. The New York Times described him as ‘the closest thing industrial design has to a celebrity’, a backhanded compliment if ever there was one. In person he is gentle […]... READ MORE

Friday, August 3, 2007

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Thad Hayes

House• August 3, 2007.
Thad Hayes did seem somewhat nonplussed by our style of interviewing but he gamely went along with it, offering us very good insights into his way of doing things. Originally trained as a landscape designer, he is unusual among interior designers because where they often say their work is mainly instinctive, he believes in being able […]... READ MORE

Friday, July 27, 2007

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Don Rattner

House• July 27, 2007.
Don and Gaby Rattner live in an elegant house in Brooklyn Heights, which they have furnished almost exclusively with antiques, old paintings and a few custom pieces. Although it does not come across as any kind of statement, it is evidence of Don’s essentially traditional approach to architecture and respect for the best of the past, […]... READ MORE

Friday, July 20, 2007

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Alexis Gregory

House• July 20, 2007.
Private Splendor: Great Families At Home By Alexis Gregory and Marc Walter The Vendome Press The cover photograph of this rather elegiac and lovely book seems to say it all. The table in a splendid red dining room is laden with flowers, china, crystal and candelabra. In front of a pair of gilded double doors stands an immaculately-attired butle... READ MORE

Friday, July 13, 2007

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Jeffrey Bilhuber

House• July 13, 2007.
There is a brittle wit and energy to Jeffrey Bilhuber that belies a more serious person. His range of reference is impressive, as is his ability to rarely say anything boring. Occasionally there is a sense that what he says is slightly rehearsed, and it probably has been, but only miliseconds beforehand in his very quick mind. He works at [&he... READ MORE

Thursday, June 21, 2007

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Juan Pablo Molyneux

House• June 21, 2007.
What a grand, incredible world Mr Molyneux lives in, but what a thoughtful, courteous and cultured man he is. His design company works on some of the most astounding design projects in the world, palaces in India, a building in Russia for the ceremonial signing of treaties, castles in the Caribbean. The drawings he showed […]... READ MORE

Friday, June 1, 2007

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Marshall Watson

House• June 1, 2007.
We interviewed Marshall Watson on Valentine’s Day, which, if you remember was also the day of a fierce and gusting snow storm, one of those days when New Yorkers make a point of going about their business as normal, despite the weather. And so did we. Part of Marshall Watson’s great kindliness showed immediately when he insisted […]... READ MORE

Friday, May 4, 2007

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Nancy Corzine

House• May 4, 2007.
Furniture and textile designer, Nancy Corzine is tiny, elegant and very, very determined. Over the years she has single-handedly built a substantial business as well as raising three children. After nursing her mother through Alzheimer’s disease, she decided to spend a good deal of her time with the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation, a no... READ MORE

Friday, April 27, 2007

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Brian McCarthy

House• April 27, 2007.
If someone wanted an example of the differences between true professional and amateur or mediocre interior design, they could do no better than use Brian McCarthy’s lovely apartment as a case study. Although he himself is clearly a disciplined person, his apartment is so gracious that there is no sense of stiff perfectionism or stage management... READ MORE

Friday, April 13, 2007

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Patsy Tarr

House• April 13, 2007.
Patsy Tarr is really dedicated to her passion: The world of dance. She produces the extraordinary dance-related magazine 2wice that appears twice a year. It was a delight to interview someone who was so unselfconsciously engaged in something that she clearly loves with all her heart. She displayed a kind of shining, joyous enthusiasm that barely... READ MORE

Friday, March 30, 2007

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Keith and Chippy Irvine

House• March 30, 2007.
Keith and Chippy Irvine do seem to come from a different time when making and doing and cultivating inner resources were the focus of life, rather than whatever is the focus now … money making, self-promotion and acquisition.  They are both British, studied together there and eventually married here in the States where they have lived […... READ MORE

Friday, March 23, 2007

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Peter Pennoyer

House• March 23, 2007.
Peter Pennoyer’s work as an architect is firmly rooted in respect for classicism and tradition, designing as he does graceful, homes that acknowledge and incorporate our cultural connections to historical precedent. His office space combined antiques and the highest of high tech. His employees were as so many modern monks, meticulously working at... READ MORE

Friday, March 2, 2007

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Clare Fraser

House• March 2, 2007.
Traditional and sticking to it, Clare Fraser seeks to create the comfort and warmth she so prizes by favoring French furniture, antiques, rich fabrics and wall coverings. It might not be making the cover of Wallpaper magazine any time soon but then, given the pendulum swings of taste, you never know … and in the meantime she […]... READ MORE

Thursday, March 1, 2007

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Robert Rufino

House• March 1, 2007.
Robert Rufino is this small-but-perfectly-formed elegant man who lives in a small-but-perfectly-formed elegant box. He had a splashy title at the time of this interview, Vice President of Creative Services and Visual Merchandising for Tiffany & Co. Today he is editor-at-large at House Beautiful (Ed’s note: Robert is currently interiors... READ MORE

Wednesday, February 28, 2007

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Joy Ingham

House• February 28, 2007.
Diana Joy Hirshon Parkinson Briggs Ingham is very wealthy, scatters curse-words freely into her conversation, smokes ‘too many’ cigarettes and is on her third husband. It all sounds very racy, a product of a certain era in American history and a family background that includes the legendary banker and art collector Jules Bache (her mat... READ MORE
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Bruce Bierman

House• February 28, 2007.
Bruce Bierman is undeniably a sweetheart, a lovely Jewish boy who showed us his hilarious and touching Bar Mitzvah video from way back when – all stiff sixties hairdos, long white gloves, platters of bright food – and him, shining little boy, kissing and kissing his doting relatives. But he did grow up. His aim, both […]... READ MORE
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Larry Laslo

House• February 28, 2007.
It was fun interviewing Larry Laslo. He had a fascinating lack of hesitation in forming swift, witty replies, honed, no doubt by years of television presenting and public speaking. If there was a somewhat practiced feel to some of what he said, then it was redeemed by an underlying sense that he was also laughing at himself […]... READ MORE
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Mark Zeff

House• February 28, 2007.
Born in South Africa, but established here on the Upper West Side, Mark Zeff was, in American parlance, a jock. In fact he might be the only jock to ever grace this design column, but it would be unfair to suggest that that is all he is. The artistic side of him seems to have eventually shaped […]... READ MORE

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