London’s Cheyne Stroll presents a sedate streetscape that bears no witness, save some blue English Heritage plaques embedded in a variety of façades, to its daredevil heritage. To the redbrick Georgian and Queen Anne residences and apartment buildings that line this Thames-facet road in Chelsea, all way of creative iconoclasts since the 3rd quarter of the 19th century have gravitated. Querulous painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler bunked here, as did dandified tastemaker Christopher Gibbs, actor Laurence Olivier, and a couple of the Rolling Stones, moreover Marianne Faithfull.
“All of Chelsea is a fairy tale for me,” says Patrick Mele, a youthful decorator who is based in New York City but looks straight out of the Cheyne Walk playbook, with a tousled mop of dim hair foaming previously mentioned an angular facial area that is pure Egon Schiele. “My finest close friend developing up was English, so I have generally been drawn to that Anglo sensibility. And I utilised to occur in this article a 10 years ago, when I labored for Ralph Lauren, to operate on the suppliers.” So, when Sara Tayeb-Khalifa and her partner, Hussein Khalifa, significant-fived Mele’s zesty decoration of a bedroom in their Manhattan apartment, they presented to send out him back throughout the pond to revamp the Cheyne Walk flat they had owned due to the fact the early 1990s.
“I had completed it room by area by room, but absolutely nothing matched—plus, I no lengthier wanted safe and sound,” clarifies the stylish Tayeb-Khalifa, a former Phillips executive who is partnering with sustainable-style designer Jussara Lee on collections of T-shirts and cushions. “I wished to make it happy: pleased colors, content property.” To that conclusion, her conversations with Mele had been peppered with references to Auntie Mame, Overlook Havisham, and the ceilings of outdated French bistros, stained “a shade that reminds you of cigarettes, wine, terrible liquor, and extra cigarettes,” Tayeb-Khalifa says with a chuckle. —Mitchell Owens
When questioned what somebody unfamiliar with his biography may possibly surmise merely by going for walks as a result of his Melbourne home, Troye Sivan remains sanguine: “I’d hope they’d consider that I’m an unpretentious man, it’s possible a bit eccentric, an individual who enjoys art and layout, somebody devoted to his family—and unquestionably the actuality that I’m gay,” states the wildly preferred 25-calendar year-old Australian singer-songwriter and actor.
Without a doubt, if that hypothetical customer happened to be a persnickety structure snob, they’d definitely not fall short to register the array of treasures by the likes of Percival Lafer, Ettore Sottsass, Tobia Scarpa, and Marios Bellini and Botta the cabinetry aspects impressed by Charlotte Perriand and Jean Prouvé and the bespoke, Memphis-flavored appointments of the bath and powder rooms. On a deeper level, even so, it would also be crystal apparent that this is the house of anyone with the cultivation and confidence to realize that fantastic style and design is as substantially about suitability and nuance as it is about crucial objects and artworks.
“Troye is an amazingly savvy collaborator. In our earliest conversations, he talked about materiality, how he wanted to really feel in his home, about the scent and the seem and the gentle. It was so a great deal additional than just a several rather things he located on Pinterest,” remembers designer David Flack of local agency Flack Studio, Sivan’s partner in the delicate, complex reimagining of the singer’s Victorian-period residence.
The house in question is a genuine architectural gem. Erected in 1869 as a handball court, the constructing was converted into a brick manufacturing unit in 1950 and then subsequently remodeled into a residence in 1970 by renowned Australian architect John Mockridge, a fixture of the area artwork-and-design scene. The conversion is claimed to be the very first adaptive reuse challenge of its type in the city. “You can image Mockridge and his close friends sitting down around consuming whiskey and speaking about artwork. I wished to protect that bohemian spirit and honor the first architecture though producing something that feels like me,” Sivan suggests. —Mayer Rus
