London’s Cheyne Walk offers a sedate streetscape that bears no witness, help save some blue English Heritage plaques embedded in various façades, to its daredevil background. To the redbrick Georgian and Queen Anne houses and condominium structures that line this Thames-facet avenue in Chelsea, all method of creative iconoclasts due to the fact the third 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, plus Marianne Faithfull.
“All of Chelsea is a fairy tale for me,” suggests Patrick Mele, a youthful decorator who is based mostly in New York Town but appears to be like straight out of the Cheyne Stroll playbook, with a tousled mop of dark hair foaming over an angular experience which is pure Egon Schiele. “My greatest good friend increasing up was English, so I have constantly been drawn to that Anglo sensibility. And I utilised to occur here a ten years back, when I worked for Ralph Lauren, to get the job done on the retailers.” So, when Sara Tayeb-Khalifa and her spouse, Hussein Khalifa, high-fived Mele’s zesty decoration of a bedroom in their Manhattan condominium, they supplied to send him back again across the pond to revamp the Cheyne Walk flat they had owned since the early 1990s.
“I experienced performed it home by area by area, but very little matched—plus, I no more time preferred risk-free,” clarifies the exquisite Tayeb-Khalifa, a previous Phillips executive who is partnering with sustainable-trend designer Jussara Lee on collections of T-shirts and cushions. “I wanted to make it pleased: happy colors, happy household.” To that stop, her discussions with Mele ended up peppered with references to Auntie Mame, Skip Havisham, and the ceilings of previous French bistros, stained “a coloration that reminds you of cigarettes, wine, undesirable alcoholic beverages, and additional cigarettes,” Tayeb-Khalifa suggests with a snicker. —Mitchell Owens
When questioned what an individual unfamiliar with his biography might surmise just by going for walks by his Melbourne home, Troye Sivan remains sanguine: “I’d hope they’d believe that I’m an unpretentious person, probably a bit eccentric, someone who enjoys art and layout, somebody devoted to his family—and unquestionably the fact that I’m gay,” says the wildly popular 25-calendar year-outdated Australian singer-songwriter and actor.
Certainly, if that hypothetical customer occurred to be a persnickety layout snob, they’d surely 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 information motivated by Charlotte Perriand and Jean Prouvé and the bespoke, Memphis-flavored appointments of the bathtub and powder rooms. On a further degree, having said that, it would also be crystal apparent that this is the dwelling of somebody with the cultivation and self-confidence to identify that great style and design is as much about suitability and nuance as it is about significant objects and artworks.
“Troye is an extremely savvy collaborator. In our earliest conversations, he talked about materiality, how he required to truly feel in his home, about the scent and the sound and the light-weight. It was so a lot a lot more than just a several pretty things he uncovered on Pinterest,” recollects designer David Flack of nearby organization Flack Studio, Sivan’s companion in the sensitive, innovative reimagining of the singer’s Victorian-era home.
The home in problem is a real architectural gem. Erected in 1869 as a handball court, the creating was transformed into a brick manufacturing unit in 1950 and then subsequently reworked into a residence in 1970 by renowned Australian architect John Mockridge, a fixture of the neighborhood artwork-and-layout scene. The conversion is reported to be the initially adaptive reuse venture of its type in the town. “You can photo Mockridge and his pals sitting down all around ingesting whiskey and speaking about art. I wished to preserve that bohemian spirit and honor the initial architecture while making some thing that feels like me,” Sivan says. —Mayer Rus
