William T. Georgis

William
Georgis
Style Compass:
William Georgis
by Jorge S. Arango
June 2013
Architect and designer
William
Georgis
has that Bruce Willis grin. You know the one: amused,
mischievous and more than a little wicked. When coupled
with his laddish looks — if one ignores the slightest wisp
of gray peaking out from the square-cut black mane
above his forehead — a natural question arises: Was
young Billy a naughty boy?
As is his wont, William Georgis decorated “against the architecture” in
Southampton, New York, placing an African chair, Gary Hume sculpture
and Nan Goldin photograph in the entryway of a traditional Colonial Revival house. All photos by T. Whitney Cox and courtesy of Monacelli
T
he 55-year-old Georgis
can’t recall playing any
elaborate childhood pranks
on his sister, Demetra, or
his brother, Theodore Jr.,
back in their hometown of Oak
Park, Illinois, and he doesn’t admit
to ever being caught with his hand
in a cookie jar. “I went to school all
my life and worked all my life,” he
insists, “Just like my mother told
me to do.” However, he adds, “I
wouldn’t say I was a dull child. The
perversity and transgression have
always been there.”
Macassar ebony paneling and antique bronze
trim envelop a Park Avenue study appointed
with mid-century Erton chairs, a custom
bamboo-inlay coffee table and Jean-Michel
Basquiat’s Self-Portrait with Suzanne.
A
h. Right. That might explain the Fifth Avenue
powder room Georgis designed for two
empty-nesters, lining it with bullet-strafed
mirrored panels. It could also offer some
insight into the 2003 American Hospital of
Paris show house bedroom he created for an imaginary
deranged woman (black moiré walls, red satin sheets,
rubber coverlet), or the “panic room” he outfitted six
years later for the Kips Bay show house (Uzis, grenades,
an oxygen tank and plenty of vodka). It might also
illuminate the particular recess of his mind from which
he excavated the inspiration for what appears to be
a bloodstained carpet in the lobby of a hedge fund’s
offices (along with a console once again shot up with
lethal ammo).
A Fifth Avenue apartment’s powder room — with bullet-riddled
mirror panels evoking a film noir scene — illustrates the narrative
strain in Georgis’s work. His clients say that guests have asked, “My
God — what happened in there?”
I
love to shock,” he concedes in Make It Fabulous: The
Architecture and Designs of William T. Georgis, his
newly published monograph from Monacelli Press.
Yet careers built singularly on shock value have a
short shelf life. What elevates his interiors above
tongue-in-cheek one-liners are the multiple layers of
art and design knowledge, historical context and narrative thrust that underpin them. The bullet-riddled
mirror panels, for example, are the work of an incorrigible storyteller. “I can
imagine an aging Joan
Crawford walking in,
looking in the mirror
and pulling a mother-ofpearl-handled pistol out
of her clutch to obliterate the lies,” he writes in
the book.
The derelict townhouse Georgis redesigned for himself and
his partner features zebrapatterned silk-velvet slipper
chairs of his own creation and
a Julian Schnabel painting.
P u r c h a s e b o o k >>
Georgis tweaks the traditional Montana cabin aesthetic —
antler chandelier, Native American wool rug — by hanging a
flashy Doug Aitken wall sculpture by the antique pool table.
B
ehold, for example, the
pairing, of a 19th-century French crucifix and a
Roman bust of Heracles,
which can be found in the
dining room of the Upper East Side
townhouse that he shares with his
companion, art curator and advisor
Richard D. Marshall. This is not mere
caprice. “You have to be able to
coax a meaning from the dialogue
that goes beyond visual splendor,”
he tells me. “There has to be an intelligent component. Here you have
the pagan and the Christian. You
have different ideas of masculinity, the homoerotic element of two
naked men, the Twelve Labours of
Heracles and the Stations of the
Cross — you could just keep riffing
on it.”
A mirrored ceiling and ebonized millwork
“de-limit” the scale of an Upper East Side
townhouse’s library, which boasts skunkpatterned pillows on the custom sofa, a
Sciolari chandelier, Carlo Bugatti chairs
and a Damien Hirst medicine cabinet.
N
ot, mind you, that Georgis is one to cast aspersions at the sheer joy of visual splendor.
Among his early influences were the lavish
Thorne Miniature Rooms at the Chicago Art
Institute. They put the history of decorative
arts in context for him and fueled what later blossomed
in his interiors as a theatricality of rich, sumptuously
worked materials, striking juxtapositions and impressive
scale. As a teen, he also led guided tours through Oak
Park’s many Frank Lloyd Wright residences, which fueled his predilection for modern architecture. And his
familiarity with the Chicago residences designed by David Adler was essential to his understanding of the way
historic European principles could be adapted to more
modern domestic American architecture.
In the living room of the same townhouse, Georgis placed his Centrifuge sofa atop his Ink Splatter rug, which, along with art by Jeff
Koons and Franz Kline, poses a modern counterpoint to an ornate
Louis XV chandelier and elaborately carved Roman mirror.
E
ncouraged to pursue these passions
by his real-estate developer father,
Theodore Sr., and his homemaker
mother, Mitzie, Georgis’s education
began with the Bauhaus-centered
art and design curriculum of the Illinois Institute of Technology, then continued at
Stanford (where he earned a degree in art
history) and, finally, Princeton (a masters in
architecture). After a short stint with Robert
Venturi and almost 10 years at Robert A.M.
Stern, a South American couple asked Georgis to design their apartment at Manhattan’s
Carlyle Hotel. His partner, Marshall — whom
he’d met in 1989, when Marshall was a curator at the Whitney Museum — had introduced him to this art-collecting couple, and
their confidence in him spurred Georgis to
set up his own firm in 1992. (Another project
for this couple appears in Make It Fabulous.)
a new generation of families who aren’t
interested in plugging into the formula,” says
Georgis. “When I went to Princeton, that
WASP class was the ascendant voice. Now
there are newcomers from other social and
cultural groups who are interested in the idea
of difference. That entrenched demographic
isn’t interested in what I do; they wouldn’t
Since then, Georgis has built a stalwart come to me.”
clientele of adventurous art collectors who,
though they might live on Park Avenue, don’t From left: A mirrored screen separating the kitchen from
the living area of Georgis’s own home reflects an Alex Katz
tend to request the old-money aesthetic painting; on the street side of the same floor, passersby
that once dominated the thoroughfare. “It’s glimpse another Katz and an Alexander Calder mobile.
For a Fifth Avenue apartment, Georgis riffed on
its location overlooking Central Park’s trees: In
the dining room, his Seed Pod chairs surround
a table with a tree-trunk base, while an illuminated bower of bronze, porcelain and crystal by
artist David Wiseman hangs above.
G
eorgis explains that his clients are “new
merchant princes,” including developer
Aby Rosen and collector and dealer
Alberto Mugrabi (son of the Israeli-born
collector José Mugrabi, who owns, among
many other works, the largest collection of Warhols in
the world). They don’t balk when he suggests hanging
half a dozen 1940s Japanese-style glass lanterns over
a chunky burl-wood coffee table on a flokati rug in the
living room of a traditional Hamptons mansion. They thrill
to his amalgamation of a 1970s Sciolari stainless-steel
chandelier with a custom Chesterfield sectional sofa,
chainmail curtains, Carlo Bugatti chairs and an alligator
skeleton hovering in midair in a library. “Remember
what they’re hanging on their walls: insane crucifixions
by George Condo!” Georgis points out. “The imagery
itself is provocative.”
In the Southampton Colonial Revival home French, 1940s glass lanterns
hang above a burl-wood coffee table and slipper chairs. A Sam Samore
photo looks out over a mod billiard table.
T
imid his clients are not. They come to Georgis
precisely because he empathizes with their
quirks and kinks, even ones they might be
uncomfortably revealing. For instance, Georgis
noticed one client liked to look at his wife in a,
well, less-than-innocent way. So he designed a bath with
louvers so he could watch her shower. “At first, they were
a little embarrassed that I’d seen that,” says Georgis, who
admits to his own fascination with voyeurism. (This is a
man, after all, who also designed a guestroom enclosed
in a transparent glass bubble.) But in the end, the couple
felt more understood than, shall we say, exposed.
As he has matured, Georgis has in some respects
become less confrontational. He admits, for instance,
to not always feeling the need to work against historic
architecture in a space, which for years was his default
response to traditional surroundings. But does that mean
his interiors are any tamer? “I don’t know,” he demurs,
his lips curling into that Willis grin. “What do you think?”
The answer: Not so much.
Don’t let the pinstripe suit fool you: The banker-like sartorial
trappings conceal the spirit of an agent provocateur.
Hotel:
Fa b r i c s :
Villa San Michele, in the hills of Fiesole, one
of the dreamier hotels on the planet, has
spectacular views over Florence. Also in the
extraordinary vista department is Perivolas,
in Oia on Santorini; the view of the caldera
will blow your mind.
Indigenous and antique textiles — crunchy
and slinky, refined and rough — are all
amazing. Silk lampas, vinyl and antique
Japanese textiles are of equal interest. More
specifically, I love fabrics by Nuno, Place
Textiles by Kristie Strasen, Bahama Hand
Prints and Tara Chapas.
M useu m:
Book:
Anything by Yukio Mishima, Joan Didion or
Henry James
Fav o r i t e A p p :
Google Maps makes me feel like a god.
E n t e r ta i n i ng :
I always prefer entertaining out of doors,
and nothing beats barbecuing on a Primo
ceramic grill. From slow smoking to searing,
it maintains moisture and intense flavor, and
it’s a great-looking gadget.
Aside from obvious stars — the Met and Frick,
the Louvre — I often tour house museums
in any city I visit, such as the Robert Brady
Museum, in Cuernavaca, and the Leighton
House Museum, in London. For more offroad adventure, I visit the Mingei Museum,
in San Diego, and the Musée de Minéralogie,
in Paris.
Art:
Richard Dupont’s transgressive figurative
art, Alex Katz’s glamour and the humanity
of ancient Greek sculpture
R e s t au r a n t :
Casa Lever is my favorite in Manhattan for
the amazing food, warm service and the
wall of Warhols. El Pescador, a fish market
with a few tables in La Jolla, California, is the
destination for fish tacos and ceviche made
from the latest catch brought in by local
fishermen.
M usic:
I listen to everything from Claudio Monteverdi and Nancy Wilson to Peaches.
Fa s h i o n :
Gift:
Anything antique and unique; books and
fresh citrus from my garden
T r av e l :
Anywhere!
For work: Anderson & Sheppard suits and
Hamilton shirts. For play: Beretta sportswear
and Stubbs & Wootton slippers and boots.
For funk: Reyn Spooner Hawaiian shirts and
bare feet.
Color :
All greens — olive, emerald, leaf, avocado
and moss
Transversal IV, by Richard
Serra, 2004, offered by Jim
Kempner Fine Art
1960s Perzel Suspension
chandelier, offered by Galerie
Edouard de la Marque
UNTITLED
(LOWLY WOMEN),
1964, 2006, by
McDermott &
McGough, offered
by Cheim & Read
William
Georgis’
Italian baroque
carved giltwood
console table,
offered by H.M.
Luther
Japanese tansu, offered by
Antiques of River Oaks
Cartier cufflinks, offered by Hollis Reh
& Shariff