Julian Schnabel’s Bold and Beautiful Designs

For years, the Gramercy Park Hotel was a down-at-the-heels place notable mainly for the famous houses that were demolished in the 1920s to make way for it.Now, when one enters the hotel from Lexington Avenue onto a red carpet laid over a black-and-white-checked, Dorothy Draper floor, the first things one notices are the carefully composed sight lines, the natural materials, and an over-the-top (though quite beautiful) crystal chandelier.These are some of the fruits of hotelier Ian Schrager’s $200 million renovation of the Gramercy Park, which he reopened in summer 2006. Mr. Schrager, in such developments as the Royalton Hotel, on West 44th Street, defined the high-concept boutique hotel of our time. (Sadly, the Royalton’s Philippe Starck-designed lobby was dismantled last year by the hotel’s new owners.) At the Gramercy Park, where the guest rooms were designed by Mr. Schrager’s in-house architects, headed by Anda Andrei, the hotelier commissioned the painter and filmmaker Julian Schnabel to design the public interiors.The sight lines in the hotel lobby provide the room with symmetrical frames for viewing asymmetrical content, such as the Schnabel-designed Aubusson carpet with its play of floral and geometrical forms and saltily stylized lettering, the seemingly casually arranged furniture, and modern paintings on the walls.Off the north side of the lobby is Jade Bar, its walls a cool jade green, its fabric upholstery blue, its curtains a deep red.There are few sights more pleasing than the bottles of liquor — a show in themselves — lined up behind the bar of a hotel lounge. Designers have played with this glinting, enticing display for as long as there have been hotel bars. It might seem nothing new could be done, but here the bottles nestle in the recess of a kind of Moresque cutout, its inner walls bathed in light of a watermelony hue. This works with the other colors to create a perfect sense of opulent decadence.As in his paintings, Mr. Schnabel’s colors infuse the spaces with intense feeling. The elements could have added up to kitsch, but don’t — indeed, not once in these rooms has the word “kitsch” even entered my mind.The larger, loungier Rose Bar, to the west, has a similar bottle arrangement, but with salmon-colored walls imparts an altogether different, jauntier feeling.Mr. Schnabel’s sensibility — of sensuous mixing and matching, of folding collecting (or accumulating) into design, of exquisite framing and fiery colors — channels that of the architect Stanford White. It also channels that of the rooms — monuments of Venetian acquisitiveness — of White’s town house, which, as it happens, stood on the very site of the Gramercy Park Hotel.Last year in the West Village, Mr. Schnabel’s sensibility sparked controversy when he designed and built his Palazzo Chupi at 360 W. 11th St., between Washington and West streets.Rising 11 stories on top of an existing three-story structure, its walls a color — Andrew Berman of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation calls it “hot pink” — not previously seen in Greenwich Village architecture, the apartment building (which seems rather a banal thing to call it) had many howling in derision, and everyone doing a double take.Here’s an instance of where I part ways with the Village preservationists. I think the sheer aesthetic chutzpah of Julian Schnabel puts today’s “starchitects” to shame.Palazzo Chupi (chupi in Spanish can mean excellent or brilliant) borrows very loosely from historical architecture. Truth be told, our Modernist architects borrow far more literally and slavishly from earlier Modernist architecture than the previous generations of traditionalists ever borrowed from historical buildings. Here Mr. Schnabel festooned his façade with seemingly randomly disposed arched openings and loggias in shapes deriving from Classical, Moorish, and Gothic (add them up and you’ve got Venetian) sources.When he was only 28, Mr. Schnabel’s 1979 solo show at Mary Boone propelled him into the artistic stratosphere. His paintings helped to define the Neo-Expressionism that swept across the gallery scene in the 1980s, a movement that bore some impulses in common with Postmodernism in architecture — sharply in contrast to the reigning Minimalism and Conceptualism.Mr. Schnabel’s paintings — with their intense coloration, pictorial density, and fierce emotional pitch — struck me as whole unto themselves, in contrast to so many other 1980s painters and architects, whose striving for effects crashed hard into the limitations of their technical training.Perhaps because he had developed a mature style while still in his 30s, he had the self-confidence, perhaps the need, to strike off in other directions. In the three feature films he has made, he has established himself as one of the important filmmakers of our time. And at the Gramercy Park and Palazzo Chupi, he’s staked his claims on interior design and architecture, too.The art critic Sanford Schwartz recently wrote in the New York Review of Books: “Encountering a Schnabel can be like visiting the remnant of a tomb from some hazily known culture and era — a site which the corrosions and stray markings of the years have made into something doubly mysterious and even more beckoning.”I couldn’t more aptly summarize Mr. Schnabel’s interior design and architecture, in which a rich aesthetic imagination, complete in itself, completely comfortable in its allusiveness, soars past the much-hyped but often half-baked productions of his contemporaries.fmorrone@nysun.com

Julian Schnabel’s Bold and Beautiful Designs

Julian Schnabel’s Bold and Beautiful Designs

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