London’s Cheyne Wander provides a sedate streetscape that bears no witness, preserve some blue English Heritage plaques embedded in a variety of façades, to its daredevil history. To the redbrick Georgian and Queen Anne houses and condominium buildings that line this Thames-aspect avenue in Chelsea, all way of creative iconoclasts given that the 3rd quarter of the 19th century have gravitated. Querulous painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler bunked right here, as did dandified tastemaker Christopher Gibbs, actor Laurence Olivier, and a couple of of the Rolling Stones, furthermore Marianne Faithfull.
“All of Chelsea is a fairy tale for me,” says Patrick Mele, a young decorator who is based mostly in New York Metropolis but seems straight out of the Cheyne Wander playbook, with a tousled mop of dark hair foaming earlier mentioned an angular facial area that’s pure Egon Schiele. “My most effective pal escalating up was English, so I have generally been drawn to that Anglo sensibility. And I applied to occur in this article a 10 years in the past, when I labored for Ralph Lauren, to operate on the retailers.” So, when Sara Tayeb-Khalifa and her husband, Hussein Khalifa, high-fived Mele’s zesty decoration of a bedroom in their Manhattan condominium, they available to mail him back throughout the pond to revamp the Cheyne Walk flat they experienced owned due to the fact the early 1990s.
“I had performed it home by area by room, but nothing matched—plus, I no for a longer period wished secure,” explains the exquisite Tayeb-Khalifa, a former Phillips executive who is partnering with sustainable-fashion designer Jussara Lee on collections of T-shirts and cushions. “I preferred to make it content: joyful hues, pleased home.” To that stop, her conversations with Mele ended up peppered with references to Auntie Mame, Overlook Havisham, and the ceilings of aged French bistros, stained “a coloration that reminds you of cigarettes, wine, terrible alcoholic beverages, and more cigarettes,” Tayeb-Khalifa says with a giggle. —Mitchell Owens
When questioned what another person unfamiliar with his biography may well surmise merely by strolling as a result of his Melbourne property, Troye Sivan stays sanguine: “I’d hope they’d imagine that I’m an unpretentious person, maybe a bit eccentric, somebody who enjoys artwork and structure, an individual devoted to his family—and unquestionably the fact that I’m homosexual,” claims the wildly well known 25-12 months-outdated Australian singer-songwriter and actor.
In truth, if that hypothetical visitor transpired to be a persnickety structure snob, they’d undoubtedly not fail to register the array of treasures by the likes of Percival Lafer, Ettore Sottsass, Tobia Scarpa, and Marios Bellini and Botta the cabinetry facts inspired by Charlotte Perriand and Jean Prouvé and the bespoke, Memphis-flavored appointments of the bathtub and powder rooms. On a further stage, nevertheless, it would also be crystal crystal clear that this is the home of anyone with the cultivation and self esteem to understand that good layout is as substantially about suitability and nuance as it is about essential objects and artworks.
“Troye is an incredibly savvy collaborator. In our earliest conversations, he talked about materiality, how he needed to experience in his household, about the scent and the seem and the light. It was so substantially far more than just a couple of quite factors he located on Pinterest,” recollects designer David Flack of community business Flack Studio, Sivan’s partner in the sensitive, innovative reimagining of the singer’s Victorian-era household.
The household in concern is a legitimate architectural gem. Erected in 1869 as a handball court docket, the creating was transformed into a brick manufacturing unit in 1950 and then subsequently remodeled into a residence in 1970 by renowned Australian architect John Mockridge, a fixture of the area art-and-layout scene. The conversion is explained to be the first adaptive reuse venture of its variety in the metropolis. “You can photograph Mockridge and his buddies sitting down all around ingesting whiskey and chatting about artwork. I wanted to preserve that bohemian spirit and honor the initial architecture when developing something that feels like me,” Sivan claims. —Mayer Rus
