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mh95 THE AN WHO WANT TO REINVENT MIAMI 06/28/1995
THE MIAMI HERALD
Copyright (c) 1995, The Miami Herald
DATE: Wednesday, June 28, 1995 EDITION: FINAL
SECTION: LIVING PAGE: lE LENGTH: 142 lines
ILLUSTRATION: color photo: French Designer Philippe Starck with the
Delano hotel in background (a) , Arquitectonica Times Square
project? (r) , Delano hotel (a) ; photo: Ian Schrager in the
Delano hotel Lobby (a)
SOURCE/CREDIT LINE: PETER WHORISKEY Herald Staff Writer
THE AN WHO WANT TO REINVENT MIAMI
The melody keeps popping into his head. It's More Than a Woman, the old
Bee Gees song. Off and on for an hour, superstar French designer Philippe
Starck whistles bits of the refrain. Exuberantly. With feeling.
Oh say you'll always be my baby.
We can make it shine.
Starck is whisking visitors through his recent remodeling of the Delano
Hotel in Miami Beach, the 1947 beach tower at 1685 Collins Ave. , where he has
designed rooms that are at once glamorous and austere: white floors, white
walls, white beds, white chairs, white TVs, even white stereos.
"The target of my work is to make the people at their best, their most
beautiful," says Starck, voice dallying tenderly over the last word.
Byootefool. "And to give them happiness and love."
Starck and haute hotelier Ian Schrager, one of the founders of Studio 54,
have arrived in South Florida amid the clamoring of out-of-town television and
newspaper cameras, the whirling pixie dust of their own celebrity. The New
York Times, Newsweek, The Washington Post, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous
-- they all want to tell the world how fabulous the hotel will be when it
opens Friday.
But Starck has a message for the local audience, too: The cosmopolite, it
seems, would like to serve as a model for South Florida in matters of taste.
You see, in his view, something is wrong with Miami. This is not exactly
news. He told The New York Times last year: "Miami style, to me, is terrible."
Then, in a six-page spread in the June issue of Vanity Fair, Schrager
recalls asking the designer, "Philippe, can you envision a new kind of Miami?"
And Philippe tells the magazine writer: "Miami is a good place, but I
think it is not very sophisticated."
We can take forever
Just a minute at a time.
As the cameras attest, the tall, wide-bodied Frenchman carries with him
the glowing embers of hip wherever he goes, whether in Manhattan, creating the
celebrated Royalton and Paramount hotels, or at home in Paris, designing
photogenic furniture. He can set fire anywhere.
And where he starts the blaze in Miami is the color scheme. One afternoon
last week, Stark, dressed in black jacket, black T-shirt, black jeans and
black boots, explained:
"This sort of fluorescent pink caricature," Starck says, waving and
frowning. "Where the vulgarity is less rare than the quality." Quillitee.
His prescription for Miami Beach amounts to chromatic cold turkey. Not
only are the Delano's rooms white on white. So is the hulking exterior.
Against the colorful, sometimes garish, pinks and blues and greens on Collins
Avenue, the Delano stands either as a model of classic simplicity, or of
corpse-like pallor. It depends on your point of view.
"I designed this building especially elegant to show to the people that
Miami is not obliged to become an amusement park," Starck says. "That it is
possible to have elegance, quality and honesty.
"In Miami we have the feeling that Everybody Must Have Fun, " he says,
clearly annoyed by the imperative. "Fun-loving. I want to show people that to
smile is better than to laugh."
The grand tour begins out back by the pool, where you find Starck
pottering and plashing his way around the shallow end. A very slight incline
begins at the pool edge, and it is as gentle as the beach. Walk 20 feet into
the water and you are still only in shin deep.
Momentarily freed of his dark Euro garb, and wearing only faded gray
trunks, Starck lies down flat in the shallow end, the water lapping at his
snowy girth. He loves his new toy.
"Bon," he says, locking his hands behind his head and looking up at the
sky. "It works. It works!"
Later, while toweling off, heaving rapid breaths of invigoration, he
pronounces:
"The swimming pool is a dream. It is the only swimming pool where you are
not obliged to swim."
Back in the black, Starck presents the hotel lobby, perhaps one of the
most elegant in South Florida. The central focus of the high-ceiling
wood-paneled room is a double row of fat round plaster columns that marches
down the middle. On either side of the columned passageway, immense floating
white cotton curtains segment the room into smaller portions. It is furnished
with a variety of styles: There is Gaudi, Dali and Eames.
"You can see silhouettes and movement behind the curtains, but not much
more, " says Anda Andrei, Schrager's design director, while Starck busies
himself elsewhere, presumably still whistling. "The point was to avoid giving
everything away immediately. The curtains are meant to create intimacy within
each space and from outside, to create mystery."
Upstairs, the rooms have more to them than simple whiteness. The design
is apparently guided by a sense of faux happenstance. An immense mirror leans
diagonally against a corner, as if recently moved in. The towel rack is a
five-runged ladder. And this fey innovation: a small metal platform jutting
from the wall where guests will find an apple. The inscription reads, "An
Apple a Day Keeps the Doctor Away. "
Starck explains:
"In a society that becomes more and more complex, and sometimes dirty,
you want to know somewhere there is a room completely white that is just
purity and serenity."
Starck is not content to whistle the Bee Gees and discuss his own $22
million design, however. What the remarkably creamy floors are made of, or
what type of wood lines the lobby, Starck doesn't know and, in fact, doesn't
seem to care. "Details, " he shrugs.
He'd rather expound on what Miamians should learn from his design
philosophy -- and offer us some sermons on, well, the attitude around here.
Talking to Starck, or reading Vanity Fair ("Part of what's right about the
Delano is its array of New York-caliber venues") , you could get the impression
that the cultural exchange between Miami and New York flows only one way --
south.
Who knows, really, how much one influences the other. But another item
of cultural news that popped up last month surely shows that Miami exports
culture to New York, too.
The Miami Beach architecture firm Arquitectonica soon will be making its
mark in the Manhattan skyline. Arquitectonica, working for Tishman Urban
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Development Corp. and its partner, Disney Development Corp. , beat out two
other world-renowned design firms in May to develop one of the most prominent
corners of New York City's Times Square.
"It is a tension of two pieces," architect Bernardo Fort- Brescia says of
the design. "One is concave and one is convex. We wanted to find a new genre
of building. Something more slender. Something sophisticated. "
But leave aside the question of sophistication, of New York vs. Miami,
the debate's as tiresome as the Marlins vs. the Mets. Starck believes the real
test is time.
"Trend is an old and obsolete idea, " he says. "Today the real elegance,
the real modernity is longevity, timelessness. "
He predicts: "This place will become a classic. "
At last, he walks off, jauntily, back into the hotel for another
appointment. The last you hear of him is the tune that squeaks once more from
his pursed lips, recalling all the distant memories of Gibb falsettos, bad
haircuts and pantsuits.
Oh more than a woman. More than a woman to me.
outlines
MARICE COHN BAND / Herald Staff
NEW MANAGEMENT: Ian Schrager, one of the founders of Studio 54 who now
owns the newly renovated Delano Hotel, lounges in the lobby, which features a
double row of fat round plaster columns and immense floating white cotton
curtains.
TIM CHAPMAN / Herald Staff