September 26, 2014

Pale Beauty – A glimpse into Stephen Sills’ newly renovated apartment

David Netto from the T Magazine sits down with Stephen to chat over the evolution of him as a designer, and as an artist.

“…Sills, now 63, recently completed redecorating the space, the third reimagining of this environment since he moved here in 1988. As happens when you meet certain movie stars, the first thing that surprises about the place is its diminutive size. Inside, the apartment’s new palette is nearly all white: The surfaces have been bleached, limed and whitewashed, creating a ghosted-over version of its former self. The one exception is a chic new dressing room, which has been veneered entirely in dyed-green satinwood paneling that suggests the first-class compartment of some mysterious European train. “I just can’t live with color anymore,” the designer says, and while he means it in a general sense, he doesn’t mean it the way Richard Meier or John Pawson would. Sills’s love of color runs deeply through his work, as the green room attests. He uses color for its potential to introduce an element of the exotic to rooms — a feeling of otherworldliness, not unlike what Wes Anderson does with his movie sets. The new apartment, with its bleached parquet floor made in Poland, monumental Hellenistic lion sculpture and daybed by Jean-Michel Frank — improbable as these contents may make it seem — is about the future. “I want it to be very Cubistic,” Sills explains enigmatically, possibly referring to the angular 1930s French armchairs posed in the living room. In the compact entrance hall, he disguised a potential disadvantage by lining the walls in a continuous gray velvet curtain, which implies that there is limitless space behind it. “Being a good decorator, you just have to know what illusion is about,” Sills says….”