2 weeks Ago By Charles Gandee
“International Style,” by Charles Gandee, was originally published in the August 1996 issue of Vogue. For more of the best from Vogue’ s archive, sign up for our Nostalgia newsletter here . In the first 21 weeks of this year, Annabelle Selldorf boarded 46 flights and flew 94,282 miles.
She made seven trips to Munich, five to Rome, four to Bermuda, four to Zurich, three to Venice, three to London, two to Cologne, and one to Mustique. Another set of numbers suggests that even when Selldorf isn't airborne, she's on the road more than Kerouac dreamed possible—these are the numbers in her cellular-phone bills, which, for the first four months of this year, totaled $2,302.93: $1,040.
52 for AT&T Wireless; $ 1,262.41 for AT&T Wireless's European counterpart, Alpha Tel. One final number, less precise but no less telling, is the number of times Selldorf has canceled her twice-a-week 6:30 a.
m. appointment with Lesley Howes, her trainer at the Madison Avenue branch of the hip-chic David Barton Gym. That number is "more often than not," according to Howes, who says of her most elusive client, "Usually I get irritated when people cancel at the last minute, but Annabelle always has a good reason—she's stuck at some airport in Europe, and there's fog.
" Summing up her peripatetic life, Selldorf says, "At this point the main difference between going to Queens for the weekend and going to Zurich for the weekend is that the food is much better in Zurich." And then, perhaps concerned that the quip makes her sound flip (which she most certainly is not), she adds, "I know it sounds terrible to say it, but it's true." Contrary to what you may have deduced, Annabelle Selldorf is not a senior official at the State Department.
Nor an executive at Exxon. She is a 36-year-old, Saab-driving architect who heads up a modest-scale firm in lower Manhattan, which she founded in a corner of her SoHo loft in 1987 when a young married couple on a budget asked her to renovate their Upper West Side kitchen. Nine years later, Selldorf is well past explaining to clients with Traulsen tastes and Westinghouse wallets the terrible truth about New York City kitchen renovations: $20,000 doesn't buy much.
Nowadays, in fact, she's less likely to be found along West Eighty-ninth Street in Manhattan than along the Rio del-la Pieta in Venice, where she spent part of last year bringing a Gothic-style palazzo dating back to the twelfth century into the late twentieth century. Or along the Limmatstrasse in Zurich, where, also last year, she transformed the top floor of an early-century brewery into a luminous gallery reminiscent of Walter Gropius's Bauhaus. Or along St.
James's Gardens in London, where, during yet another part of last year, she revved a nineteenth-century rectory up to Architectural Digest speed. While such projects might make Selldorf the envy of every architect under 40 in Manhattan, she pays a price for her passport-at-the-ready practice. "Do I have a boyfriend?" she sighs.
"What are you trying to do? Reduce me to tears? I don't even have a houseplant." Clearly forgetting about Zurich's epicurean delights, Selldorf adds that "contrary to what people think, it's not a bit glamorous" to have the kind of life that requires her to switch from English to German to French to Italian, which she effortlessly does. "But what I get out of it is more interesting work.
You know, there are only so many opportunities in New York." It's true that the kinds of commissions that young, small firms headed by single women tend to be presented with in Manhattan are shops, apartments, and the occasional addition to a summerhouse in the Hamptons, but Selldorf has done better than most. In SoHo, for example, she is this decade's answer to 1100 Architect, another downtown firm, which at its high-profile peak in the late eighties counted Ross Bleckner, Eric Fischl, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, and Jacqueline Schnabel among its clients.
Like 1100, Selldorf made her name among SoHo's resident artistic community, designing low-budget galleries and living spaces that might best be described as very clean, very lean, very precise, and very white. Not only does Selldorf amplify the original character of SoHo's building stock by leaving exposed such vestiges of the neighborhood's industrial past as iron columns and radiators, but she cleans and sandblasts these humble elements to David Smith perfection. She also likes to specify stainless-steel kitchen fittings, which she buys "off the shelf" at professional restaurant-supply shops on the Bowery—and installs with the same precision she uses to install vintage French walnut cabinetwork on Park Avenue.
This decidedly modernist sensibility is second nature to Selldorf, who grew up in one of the few residential lofts in Cologne, which her father, an architect, filled with "lots of Gio Ponti-ish furniture." After high school, she earned enough money working in a furniture store to buy a ticket to New York, where she met a French boy who made her wish she could stay. When the money ran out, she returned to Cologne, got a job on a construction site, and saved her deutsche marks.
Which enabled her return to Manhattan—alas, the French boy had vanished—and enroll in architecture school at Pratt. To Pay for her "tragic" 100-square-foot fifth-floor walk-up off Columbus Avenue—"It had a skylight, but no window"—Selldorf talked her way into the office of Richard Gluckman, the architect responsible for Larry Gagosian's pristine SoHo gallery and the Dia Center's Zen-like outpost on West Twenty-second Street. Of her SoHo portfolio, Selldorf says, "Sometimes I think what I do borders on the boring because it's not very loud.
" Perhaps. But in the aftermath of the eighties, "not very loud" was regarded as a design virtue—in architecture as in fashion. (Remember Calvin and Donna's "monastic" phase?) Still, Selldorf would argue that the low-key tack she took for Eric Fischl's painting studio, John McEnroe's gallery, and Michael Werner's loft was less a response to the penitent early days of this decade than to her conviction that architects should tread lightly and make their mark not with dramatic flourishes but with satisfying proportions and well-honed details.
"I think that my aesthetic can be generally described as restrained, and therefore fundamentally modern," sums up Selldorf, who regards the fact that she has no particular stylistic ax to grind as a point of pride. If a house by Richard Meier or a museum by Frank Gehry is instantly recognizable as such, Selldorf's work requires a second glance. Because rather than white porcelain-enamel panels or strident sculptural forms, her signature is a chameleonlike quality of fitting in.
"It's important to me that something I design looks like it belongs to the person I designed it for, as well as to the place it's in," she explains. "If, say, I design an apartment on Fifth Avenue for an investment banker, I don't try to make it look like a loft in SoHo for a young artist." Although Selldorf's conviction that “"or an architect, it's the context that generates the information" is as familiar as postmodernism, what she does with that information is less so.
At David Salle's new seventeen-acre compound overlooking the Atlantic on Long Island, for example, Selldorf clearly took cues from the area's early-century houses and potato barns. But there's a tautness to the quarter of shingled and gabled volumes she arranged around a central courtyard, which rescues the composition from the brink of sentimentality. Selldorf eschewed shutters, dormers, latticework, and gingerbread trim in favor of a kind of Quaker simplicity.
"What interested me," she says, "was exploring the possibilities of abstraction within the 'traditional' building forms that David and I agreed are appropriate to this part of Long Island." What also interested Selldorf was the potential for creating a series of outdoor "rooms," which took shape when she arranged the four "cedar boxes"—Salle's house, studio, garage, and pool pavilion. "Naturally, I care about what the buildings look like," she says.
"But, for me, what happens in between the buildings is as important as the buildings themselves." Though Salle didn't specifically request the series of outdoor "rooms," Selldorf was obsessed with creating them. "You know," she says, "in 20 years, when I look back on my work, I don't want to think that I just did what people asked me to do.
" If, as the Salle commission suggests, Selldorf's client roster is currently heavy on the well-known and well-heeled side, her aversion to conspicuous architectural consumption remains unchanged from her salad days in SoHo. Last year, when Barneys New York decided to renovate the fifth floor of its Madison Avenue store, Gene Pressman called on Selldorf, who removed every luxe trace of architect Peter Marino, who had designed the space two years earlier. In lieu of Marino's signature gold-leaf ceilings, sycamore paneling, and Jean-Michel Frank club chairs upholstered in tobacco suede, Selldorf washed the space in white, of course, and as a foil to the hard-edged steel clothing racks she inserted, introduced a collection of funky forties furniture she found at Fred Silberman's not-quite-antiques shop in SoHo.
And perhaps to prove that she's not averse to a bit of irony in retailing, she also designed a pair of oval, freestanding dressing rooms that appear to have been modeled after Paris pissoirs. Pissoirs and funky furniture notwithstanding, what takes center stage at Barneys isn't Selldorf's designs but Isaac Mizrahi's and Michael Kors's and Victor Alfaro's and Dolce & Gabbana's. Veteran New York art dealer Barbara Gladstone, who is now working with Selldorf on a new 8,000-square-foot gallery in Chelsea, confirms that Selldorf is clear on the question of function.
"The thing about Annabelle that I like is that she's capable of having the architecture serve the art. In other words, she wants things to work." Gladstone also gives Selldorf high marks for being "direct and clear and sensible and sensitive, not to mention inspired.
And she's gorgeous to boot." Considering that women are not at an advantage in the profession of architecture, it's hardly surprising that Selldorf downplays the "gorgeous" part. She tends to favor a somewhat androgynous, I-mean-business "uniform," which typically consists of a white man-tailored shirt, a charcoal-gray Jil Sander suit, black Belgian loafers, and a black nylon Prada bag—which contains, as you may have guessed, a black leather agenda and a black cellular phone.
The neutral, no-frills image suits Selldorf, because it deflects attention away from the architect and onto the architecture. Plus, of course, if Selldorf has only a "uniform" to pack, she exponentially improves her chances of making the noon flight to Rome. And Selldorf has to make the noon flight to Rome because after she finishes giving David Salle's contractor hell for slipping behind schedule on the pool pavilion, she has to go to Tuscany—to install the furniture in an idyllic stone-and-stucco vacation house that six months ago was a derelict stable.
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