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A Point Of Interest

Odegard at Home

For her Manhattan apartment, premier carpet purveyor Stephanie Odegard collected furnishings from all over the globe and
anchored them with rugs of her own design

Written by Cara Greenberg • Photographed by Antoine Bootz
Produced By Linda O'Keeffe

Stephanie Odegard crisscrosses the globe for her prestige carpet and home-furnishings business. Over the past two decades of socially conscious entrepreneurship, she's created gainful employment for more than 10,000 artisans in Nepal and India and won acclaim for both her carpet designs and her efforts to end child labor in the rug industry. But it was only recently, as she neared 60, that she finally bought herself a proper sofa.

I'd had a beat-up Chesterfield, futons, platforms. This is my first serious sofa," she says. It's a custom seven-footer designed by Ben Baldwin for Larsen Furniture around 1970, and it anchors the living room of her serenely exotic 1,300-square-foot one-bedroom-plus-den flat in a converted SoHo office building. The classic leather sofa and other pedigreed pieces, including Hans Wegner dining chairs and Swedish Biedermeier armchairs, set off an eclectic bazaar of antique and contemporary textiles and handcrafts.

Soft-spoken and unpretentious, Odegard has done well by doing good, though that was never her plan. "Recently someone said to me, 'You're still a Peace Corps volunteer,' " says the Minnesota-bred businesswoman, who spent two years in Fiji in the 1970s helping local artists market their crafts. Similar assignments in Jamaica for the United Nations and Nepal for the World Bank followed, leading to the establishment of her own rug company in 1987. Quick to credit her success to the craftspeople who make her products, she never wanted to be center stage. "I'm a vehicle for it all," she says.

Hand-dyed and -knotted carpets made in the centuries-old Tibetan tradition are the backbone of Odegard's $15-million-a-year operation. Her genius was in introducing fresh, contemporary designs, created by simplifying busy traditional motifs found on sources as varied as antique cut velvet, Indian saris and Japanese kimonos. She has also developed a modern palette of rich, saturated vegetable dyes and increased the knots per square inch to further soften her carpets, which are made of lanolin-rich wool from long-haired Himalayan sheep. The technique also helps the rugs appeal to an affluent, Western market.

Odegard's living room is grounded by a spectacular 22-foot-long silk-and-wool Arcade rug that evokes "saffron and rhubarb -- it's gold with a lot of pink in it." With a minimalist border motif borrowed from a Byzantine-era painting, it is one of six designs from her Byzantine collection, produced in conjunction with the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

"I'm very much a surface designer, not a 3-D designer," says Odegard, who has no formal design training. Several years ago, she teamed up with French design force Paul Mathieu. "I took him to India," she says, "and he really related to the craft workers and had a good feel for what they were doing." The results of their fruitful collaboration include hand-carved marble tables in cutwork filigree, a line of marble cloche pendant lights, cabriole-leg tables encased in gleaming hand-hammered brass, and carved teak cabinets covered in silver.

The understated tone-on-tone designs of Odegard's carpets have been compared to Mark Rothko's color-block paintings, with their subtle striations that create shimmer, complexity and depth. The abstract florals and geometric patterns are sometimes bold, sometimes nearly hidden, as in the deep-red carpet that covers the floor in a music room off the living room.

The walls throughout the apartment, which was designed with the help of architect Stephen Alastair Wanta, are suffused with pale color from Martha Stewart. Lavender and pink are "friendly, happy colors," Odegard believes. The music room is a more assertive periwinkle blue (Digitalis Mauve #43), and the bedroom is the faintest yellow (Salmon Favorelle #19), with a textured treatment akin to Venetian plaster. The beauty of these subtle hues, says Odegard, is that "they go with everything and change with the light."

Odegard's use of jewel-toned silks for pillows and window coverings has a human backstory: "In India, stores collect hand-woven silk from villages and sell it in what they call khadi emporiums. Mahatma Gandhi believed that as long as people would hand-weave and hand-spin, they would be employed, so there would be less violence. I very much agree, and I try to support these emporiums."

For all Odegard's collecting, she shows admirable restraint. "I don't go looking for things to fit my space," she says. "I buy things whose craftsmanship and materials I'm drawn to, but only what I need. I try not to buy anything extra."

What the Pros Know

Odegard's carpets, with their rich colors and textures, are like pieces of art around which to build a room. She has likened solid-color carpets, often favored by architects and designers, to "background music," because they harmonize so easily with furnishings and art. On the other hand, says architect Stephen Alastair Wanta, who has designed all of Odegard's homes and showrooms, "the asymmetrical designs of modern rugs can help you out" by becoming "a real decorative element or point of interest" when placed strategically. Carpets are "place-making devices," as Wanta puts it, particularly in a loft space with wide-open expanses and low-slung furniture. "You can use a rug to define a special zone or oasis -- an 'island' in the floor -- where the furniture on it becomes a set piece within the larger environment." Furniture can be on the rug or off the rug, or somewhere in between; there are no rules, Wanta says.

 

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source: Metropolitan Home Magazine December 2008

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The House of Gucci

The Tuscan villa of designer Frida Giannini reflects her high-style, but low-key aesthetic

By CHRISTINA PASSARIELLO

As the creative force behind Gucci's clothing and accessory collections, Frida Giannini is known in the fashion world for the way she draws inspiration from the Italian luxury brand's archives to create classic, wearable designs.

Much less discussed is how Ms. Giannini applies the same design philosophy to create new spaces. She designed Gucci's new flagship store in New York. (She heads there next week for a charity event; proceeds from the sale of a special collection of Gucci handbags will be donated to Unicef-run programs in Africa.) And her love of interiors is apparent throughout her eclectic-yet-thoroughly-contemporary 18th-century Italian villa, nestled in the hills above Florence.

"Architecture and interior design are my second passion in life," says 37-year-old Ms. Giannini.

Dave Yoder

Frida Giannini on the steps connecting her living room to her "tech room." She and her husband knocked out walls to create a larger, lighter space.

A 10-minute drive from her office, the villa's turquoise-tiled indoor pool overlooks a garden with olive groves in the distance. Windows are set to the west and south to catch the best light. "I grew up in the south of Italy, so light is fundamental," says Ms. Giannini, peering out of huge windows at her German shepherd, Gunner, on the patio.

When she and her Web-designer husband Giovanni Battista Guidi bought their villa three years ago, they tore it apart. Ms. Giannini loved the traditional tiled-roof exterior of the house. But the villa felt too old-fashioned and cramped inside: a succession of three dark rooms made up the heart of the living area. With the help of her father, an architect in Rome, Ms. Giannini knocked down the walls, turning the dining and lounge areas into a long, light space with white walls and dark wood floors.

At home as on the runway, historical references guide Ms. Giannini's aesthetic vision. The bright white walls serve as the backdrop to an amalgam of furniture dating from the 1930s to the 1970s. Ms. Giannini picked up a 1950s black bar cabinet at one of her favorite shops on Rome's antique-furniture row, Via dei Coronari. A former equestrian, Ms. Giannini cherishes an antique rocking horse her husband bought for her from a shop in a Dolomite mountain village.

In Ms. Giannini's favorite area, a living room with a marble fireplace, there are stacks of books on 1940s cinema, interior designer Kelly Wearstler, artist Jeff Koons and French photographer Guy Bourdin. Down a short flight of stairs is the "tech room," which holds the designer's collection of 8,000 vinyl records from the 1970s and 1980s, a flat-screen television and a Wii console.

"There is a common aesthetic that accompanies me in my life and my job," says Ms. Giannini. "It's a respect and love for history, reinterpreted in a contemporary way."

Dave Yoder

A coral print hangs over a small antique table.

The quiet villa is also a reflection of Ms. Giannini's hard-working lifestyle. She isolates herself before a fashion show or during brainstorms for a new collection. Even when she entertains, Ms. Giannini is often wrapped up in work. Members of her design team are her most frequent dinner guests.

For decades, the fashion business has celebrated designers whose larger-than-life personas are inextricably linked with their brands. Chanel's white-haired Karl Lagerfeld never leaves his house without his black gloves and a scowl. Louis Vuitton's Marc Jacobs was recently photographed for a New York magazine posing in his underwear. Donatella Versace's dyed platinum hair and hard-partying lifestyle embody the brash style of her eponymous brand.

Even Tom Ford, Ms. Giannini's predecessor, revamped Gucci in the 1990s largely thanks to his own image as a sex symbol, transforming it from a staid brand for grandmothers into one of the world's hottest labels. Customers bought Gucci for a piece of the sultry image Mr. Ford had created. "A brand becomes famous through its designer's personality," says Vogue Italia editor-in-chief Franca Sozzani.

Ms. Giannini is testing that adage. She is rarely photographed in magazines and says she's not a "party girl" -- unlike her predecessor, who feted his departure from Gucci with a pole-dancing bash. A self-defined "control freak" who doesn't drink coffee because of stress-related stomach problems (she still drinks Diet Coke), Ms. Giannini also starts her catwalk shows relatively on-time, unusual in the fashion world.

"Some people still love the psychodrama [of designers]. Some like to identify with a healthy, optimistic, realistic person," says the designer, dressed casually in brown corduroys and tall black riding boots and lounging in her tech room. "The fashion world is divided."

She's also taken Gucci in a vastly different direction than her predecessor. Far from Mr. Ford's plunging necklines, Mr. Giannini's designs are softer, more feminine and more classic.

"It's a very different vibe from five years ago when Tom [Ford] was in charge," says Tom Julian, a New York-based fashion consultant. Gucci is a "long way from the sexy world of the '90s." The new direction hasn't caused any blip in the consistent upwards march in Gucci's sales. Experts expect Gucci's strength in accessories to help it carry through the current downturn. Gucci is a division of French conglomerate PPR SA.

As her responsibilities at Gucci have grown, Ms. Giannini has found a new way to unwind -- amidst the black and stainless steel counters of her kitchen.

"This is my kingdom," she says, standing at the center island, a retro-style espresso machine in front of her. "If you give me two hours free and three kilos of vegetables, I will cut them all up. It's like therapy."

Soon Ms. Giannini may find herself with a new home-renovation project before her. Next spring, Gucci's designer and her team of about 40 are transferring their offices to Rome.

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