“18 of the Most Beautiful Home Offices in AD - Architectural Digest” plus 1 more

18 of the Most Beautiful Home Offices in AD - Architectural Digest

Posted: 21 Apr 2020 01:57 PM PDT

Suddenly, millions of individuals are working from home for the foreseeable future. And while home offices have traditionally been a luxury, reserved only for those with enough square footage to reappropriate unused bedrooms, their siren calls have arguably never sounded quite so clarion. Over the years, AD has featured countless such spaces within the pages of its magazine. While many such rooms luxuriate in their own expanse, others consist of simply a well-placed kitchen nook or stylish bedroom desk.

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Throughout the past month, as AD staff members have gotten settled into various #WFH routines of their own, the topic of home offices has been on our minds as never before. After beginning to look through the magazine's extensive archive, which is available through AD PRO, countless beguiling photographs of home offices emerged. From there, the batch of images was whittled down further, to the 18 beautiful examples you'll find below.

There's plenty to unpack. For starters, there are interiors by AD100 designers such as Dimore Studio, Annabelle Selldorf, Kelly Wearstler, and Rose Tarlow. There are also a handful of spaces in which fashion-world insiders—from Derek Blasberg to Stefano Pilati—have been taking care of business for years. And finally, famous names of a different sort are lurking just beyond a couple more page scrolls: Michael Douglas's 1980s Santa Barbara office is included, as is that of the first lady, circa the Ronald Reagan years. In the end, from city apartments to country houses to even one decorator showcase, the examples included can't help but delight. So take a break from your actual work, and kick off an interiors daydreaming session.

Photographed by Christopher Mottalini, AD, September 2019

A Modern Jewel Box of an Office

In September 2019, Evan Yurman of the jewelry brand David Yurman welcomed AD into his Upstate New York home. While the house featured an outdoor pool, angular bathtub, and impressive wooden facade, its office was a clear bright spot within the vacation compound. At first mention, the terms vacation retreat and office might seem to suggest a paradox, but as Yurman said at the time, "It's so quiet. You can really focus when you're here. Then you drive back to the city the next morning for work." Inside the room, a Jean Prouvé desk, Milo Baughman coffee table, and Philip Arctander chairs can all be seen, undoubtedly beautiful baubles to anoint Yurman's well-decorated jewel box.

A Centennial in Vintage Jewelry - The New York Times

Posted: 06 Dec 2019 12:00 AM PST

Next year will mark the 100th anniversary of Siegelson, the New York estate jewelry dealer that has established a reputation for offering some of the world's finest masterpieces of 20th-century design.

Earlier this year, it sold a 1935 aquamarine and ruby belt necklace — a bold American Art Deco piece designed by Fulco di Verdura for the New York jeweler Paul Flato, and originally owned by Cole Porter's wife, Linda Lee — to the actress Jennifer Tilly. An altogether more ethereal jewel, a pastel plique-à-jour Art Nouveau brooch once owned by the turn-of-the-20th-century actress Ada Rehan, was sold in 2013 to the Newark Museum of Art.

Representing the third generation of his family to operate the business, Lee Siegelson works from his private showroom on Fifth Avenue and counts museums around the world and the likes of Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels among his clients. Since he took over the family business in 1994, he has succeeded in changing not only the way it operates but the wider industry as well.

"Lee Siegelson has spearheaded today's transformation of the antique jewelry trade," said Vivienne Becker, a jewelry historian, "turning it from a rather insular, anachronistic wheeler-dealer business, divorced from modern-day fashion, life and lifestyle into a vibrant, relevant element of the luxury world and contemporary connoisseurship."

Stellene Volandes, editor in chief of Town & Country magazine, echoed the praise. "Lee has been one of my great jewelry teachers," Ms. Volandes said. "I love sitting by his desk and watching him pick up the phone. You sort of expect him to order a coffee and then he asks instead for Art Deco Cartier.

"When you first meet him you might think he wants to talk about the big game, but then he starts in about some new Belperron," she added, referring to the French jewelry designer Suzanne Belperron. "It is all part of the magic of visiting Siegelson."

Mr. Siegelson, 49, champions an approach that focuses on a piece's design value and intensive research of its background and provenance rather than merely the financial value of a jewel's precious parts. "A fabulously sleek Fouquet bracelet deserves the same attention as a great painting," he said in a recent telephone interview after his company's annual participation in the Tefaf New York Fall fair.

When the company attends such fairs, its wares are showcased in carefully lit, free-standing cabinets that command attention. And just as a museum might expound on the history and meaning of the art it displays, Siegelson entices clients with scholarly research and archival images. For example, before he sold Claudette Colbert's 1937 Boivin starfish brooch to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston this year, it was displayed with a glamorous black and white photograph of the Hollywood star wearing the piece accompanied by the tale of its genesis.

"Jewelry doesn't exist in a vacuum," Mr. Siegelson said, citing early 20th century designers, like Jean Després, who soaked up the aesthetics of the automobiles and the architecture around them to create jewels with sleek curved lines and bold contrasts. "I like to put these pieces in context of the time in which they were made. It gives a sense of validity to what the client is purchasing."

Industry experts are complimentary. "The level of detail in Lee's cataloging is beyond," said Frank Everett, the senior vice president of jewelry at Sotheby's in New York. "He uncovers every single detail there is to cover in a jewel."

And the approach clearly produces results. Though Mr. Siegelson would not disclose precise financial details of the family-owned company, he said annual sales in recent years have reached 10 figures and the company sells about 100 pieces a year. Most of them are priced from $15,000 to $50 million. They regularly include work by pre-eminent designers and important gemstones, clocks and Siegelson's own contemporary creations.

The company's origins, however, were more humble.

Its story is an American tale of an immigrant's self-made success, the kind of tale heard often in New York City. Little is known about the early life of Louis Siegelson, the company's founder and Mr. Siegelson's grandfather, other than that he came to the United States from Russia and opened a watch and watch repair shop in 1920 in the working class predominantly Jewish neighborhood of Brownsville, in Brooklyn.

In 1946, Louis's son, Herman — or Hy as he was known in the trade — exchanged the company's entire stock for a single diamond and moved the business to the bustling heart of Manhattan's Diamond District, the strip of West 47th Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues. Owning what the family says was the largest independent store on 47th Street at the time, he dealt in diamonds, precious and semiprecious colored gems, and estate jewels.

Mr. Siegelson, by contrast, said he never considered a career in jewelry while he was growing up. His parents divorced when he was 3 years old and, after his mother remarried, he grew up in Michigan. "The business was always a bit of a mystery to me when I used to visit my father during college," he said.

Things quickly changed after he graduated in 1992 from the University of Colorado Boulder with a bachelor's degree in economics and decided to try working alongside his father, who had cancer. Mr. Siegelson said he was forced to become a quick and independent learner when his father went into the hospital shortly afterward.

The antique jewelry trade was a very different business in those days, he said. The district was ruled by its traders, who had unspoken but stringent laws of honor.

"The dealers, the brokers — predominantly Hasidic Jews — would line up to see my father, and then me, every day and show the stones and jewels they had to sell," Mr. Siegelson recalled. "If you liked something, you would put it in an envelope and write your offer on it. They would then go back to the owner and see if the offer was accepted."

Feeling pressured by the dealers waiting for decisions, Mr. Siegelson said, "I would have to ask them to leave it overnight, then sit down with my father in the hospital and see what he thought we should pay for it." Once a price was offered, there would be no going back on the deal.

After about six months, Mr. Siegelson's father said he did not want to talk business again until he was better. "It was the scariest day of my life," Mr. Siegelson said. "In a way, though, it was the best thing that could have happened. You learn so much on your own."

His father died in 1994 and, in 1998, Mr. Siegelson moved the business to the more upmarket environs of Fifth Avenue and 48th Street, where it operates today, and honed his offering to the jewelry houses and designers of the 1920s and '30s. "I was trying to figure out what were the great masterpieces of the 20th century," he said.

Credit...Photographs by Yana Paskova for The New York Times

Mr. Siegelson was one of the first to appreciate the renewed appeal of Ms. Belperron, whose work was largely forgotten after her retirement in the 1970s. Her creations often had average gems, but their powerful designs, metalwork and silhouettes appealed to him. "A great jewel is the complete package: the gemstone, the sculptural aspect and the craftsmanship," he said.

He says he believes his school years at Cranbrook, in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., played a large part in shaping his aesthetic. In the 1930s, the Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen designed the entire campus, from the classroom blackboards to the garden sculptures. "Everything was intentional," Mr. Siegelson said. "Like a great jewel, there's nothing I would change."

These days, the kind of pieces he handles are hard to come by; their value and desirability have increased significantly. But he still does uncover treasures from time to time.

At the Tefaf fair last month, he sold a 1950s Belperron platinum bombé ring peppered with baguette diamonds, which he acquired from one private client and sold to another. He also sold a striking Art Deco Cartier double-faced partner's clock in chrome with a black face.

Identifying the classics of the future is another one of Mr. Siegelson's passions. He is the only dealer to represent the work of Daniel Brush, a contemporary artist and jeweler, and he has sold pieces by emerging jewelry design stars like Lauren Adriana and Emmanuel Tarpin. "Every time I buy something" to sell, he said. "It brings me closer to the fact that I'm continually learning myself."