
London’s Cheyne Wander presents a sedate streetscape that bears no witness, save some blue English Heritage plaques embedded in several façades, to its daredevil background. To the redbrick Georgian and Queen Anne properties and condominium properties that line this Thames-aspect avenue in Chelsea, all way of innovative iconoclasts because the third quarter of the 19th century have gravitated. Querulous painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler bunked listed here, as did dandified tastemaker Christopher Gibbs, actor Laurence Olivier, and a couple of the Rolling Stones, plus Marianne Faithfull.
“All of Chelsea is a fairy tale for me,” says Patrick Mele, a younger decorator who is based mostly in New York City but seems to be straight out of the Cheyne Wander playbook, with a tousled mop of darkish hair foaming earlier mentioned an angular confront that’s pure Egon Schiele. “My best close friend expanding up was English, so I have often been drawn to that Anglo sensibility. And I employed to appear listed here a decade ago, when I labored for Ralph Lauren, to function on the retailers.” So, when Sara Tayeb-Khalifa and her partner, Hussein Khalifa, large-fived Mele’s zesty decoration of a bedroom in their Manhattan condominium, they supplied to mail him again across the pond to revamp the Cheyne Wander flat they had owned considering the fact that the early 1990s.
“I had completed it room by home by area, but very little matched—plus, I no for a longer time desired protected,” explains the stylish Tayeb-Khalifa, a previous Phillips government who is partnering with sustainable-manner designer Jussara Lee on collections of T-shirts and cushions. “I wished to make it happy: happy colors, joyful home.” To that stop, her conversations with Mele had been 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 liquor, and much more cigarettes,” Tayeb-Khalifa claims with a giggle. —Mitchell Owens
When requested what another person unfamiliar with his biography could possibly surmise basically by going for walks through his Melbourne dwelling, Troye Sivan stays sanguine: “I’d hope they’d believe that I’m an unpretentious man, probably a bit eccentric, someone who loves artwork and style, an individual devoted to his family—and unquestionably the fact that I’m gay,” claims the wildly well-liked 25-calendar year-aged Australian singer-songwriter and actor.
Without a doubt, if that hypothetical customer occurred to be a persnickety design and style snob, they’d absolutely not fail to sign up the array of treasures by the likes of Percival Lafer, Ettore Sottsass, Tobia Scarpa, and Marios Bellini and Botta the cabinetry facts encouraged by Charlotte Perriand and Jean Prouvé and the bespoke, Memphis-flavored appointments of the tub and powder rooms. On a deeper amount, nonetheless, it would also be crystal apparent that this is the household of a person with the cultivation and self confidence to acknowledge that good structure is as a lot about suitability and nuance as it is about essential objects and artworks.
“Troye is an exceptionally savvy collaborator. In our earliest conversations, he talked about materiality, how he wished to truly feel in his residence, about the scent and the seem and the light. It was so substantially extra than just a several rather items he found on Pinterest,” recalls designer David Flack of area business Flack Studio, Sivan’s husband or wife in the sensitive, sophisticated reimagining of the singer’s Victorian-era house.
The household in problem is a real architectural gem. Erected in 1869 as a handball court docket, the setting up was converted into a brick manufacturing facility in 1950 and then subsequently reworked into a residence in 1970 by renowned Australian architect John Mockridge, a fixture of the nearby artwork-and-design scene. The conversion is said to be the very first adaptive reuse job of its form in the town. “You can photograph Mockridge and his friends sitting down about consuming whiskey and talking about artwork. I needed to protect that bohemian spirit and honor the first architecture whilst building anything that feels like me,” Sivan states. —Mayer Rus
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