Luxury Home: Right on Cue
March 1, 2008
If there is anyone who knows how to pack a sophisticated visual punch in a small space, it is Jamie Drake. The designer has a killer clientele—including Michael Bloomberg and Madonna—who flock to him for his signature sense of restrained luxury spiked with modern color pizzazz. When one of those clients, a 60ish financial services executive, announced he wanted a billiard room in his New York apartment, Drake knew exactly what to do. "I wanted to create a Moderne environment as a wonderful vessel to hold a diversity of other elements," he explains.
For inspiration, he looked to the famed decorator Paul Dupré-Lafon, who designed for Hermès as well as most of France’s upper-crust families from the 1930s through the ’60s. This translated to walls of square panels individually upholstered in coral-red leather and bordered in mahogany trim and bronze stripping. "The red is a continuation of the color theme in the dining room, living room and library," says Drake. "In those rooms it’s just an accent color, but it becomes the envelope here." Red also gave the designer the excuse he needed to eschew the usual green felt billiard table surface for vivid persimmon.
Drake dressed a bay window with a custom sofa upholstered in Shetland wool and cashmere (with custom-embroidered trim reiterating the geometric forms of a circa 1890 Agra carpet). Then he proceeded to fill the room with exquisite objects such as an Oriental alabaster-and-white-marble fireplace surround with Ferdinand Leger’s 1920 painting Deux Femmes a Leur Toilette hanging above it; a 19th-century English suite of mahogany billiard furniture with satinwood inlay (table, marker scoreboard cabinet, revolving cue rack and bar) that was originally commissioned for Tsar Nicholas; a 19th-century French Empire-style chandelier; and, most spectacularly, The Card Players, an enormous Theodor Rombouts painting from about 1635. "Putting an incredibly scaled painting in a low-ceiling room skews perspectives playfully," observes Drake. "You could almost step into it."
Jamie Drake, Drake Design Associates, 212.754.3099, www.drakedesignassociates.com
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