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HOUSE
& GARDEN April 2003
Pool
Party
In
Florida
, Scott
Sanders Gives a
Mid-century
Bungalow a Joyful New Beach Ball Palette
Most interior designers shop with their clients at design centers and
antique stores. Jennifer
Rubell and her decorator, Scott Sanders, went to Toys “R” Us.
They have worked together for years, and as usual, they argued
over each acquisition—retro toys and inflatable animals00for her 1952
Florida
bungalow.
At the blow-up-toy section, Sanders spotted a giant inflatable octopus.
“I said we had to have it,” he says.
“Jennifer said no, but then she went along.
When we got home, I put it on the beam in the living room, and
she said, 'It’s not going to stay there!' But she never took it
down.”
“The octopus is now the house mascot,” Rubell says.
Theirs is a design marriage that shouldn’t work.
Sanders is a Piqua, Ohio-born decorator who got his start at
Ralph Lauren and is known for his preppy good taste.
Rubell, who grew up in
Manhattan
,
is a 32-year-old hotel entrepreneur with a Harvard degree, and admits,
“I am very childlike.” Yet
they collaborate beautifully and have created a house where sleek lines
and bold color temper whimsy. “We
fight all the time,” Rubell says, “but what I like about Scott is
that he is game for anything.”
She bought the house because she loved it light and its thoughtful
architecture. The builder
who designed it lived there for 50 years.
It was close enough to the Beach House Bal Harbour Hotel—which
Rubell co-owns with her parents, Donald and Mera, and her brother,
Jason—that she could walk to work.
When she approaches Sanders for help, he knew what he was in for.
He first worked for the Rubells on the design of the
Hamptons-inspired Beach House Hotel, which he filled with Ralph Lauren
furniture and fabrics. “What
I remember is four people, with four different ideas, all talking at the
same time, “ he says. He
is helping the Rubells create a tongue-in-cheek Best Western in a Morris
Lapidus-designed building in
Washington
that is slated to open later this year.
Jennifer Rubell, who oversees the look and feel of her family’s
hotels, likes to come up with a concept—she calls it a
“narrative”—that drives the design.
It’s the same with her houses.
When Sanders became an independent interior designer, his first
project was Rubell’s
New
York
apartment, where she wanted an “urban farmhouse” theme.
He also helped her with her previous Florida residence, which had
green chalkboard paint on all the walls.
This time her concept was a pool house, which made sense for the
open-plan house, where the swimming pool shares a roof with the living
room. “It’s like the
elephant in the middle of the room,” she says.
“You can’t ignore the pool, and why would you want to?”
Rubell and Sanders decided on a beach ball color scheme” yellow, red,
and white. For furniture,
they shopped for classic 1950s shapes in thrift stores and had an
automotive shop spray pieces with Benjamin Moore enamel paint.
To streamline the design, Sanders chose fabrics in bright solid
colors, mainly vinyls and Sunbrella upholstery, which won’t fade in
the sun. A Marimekko stripe
got the nod from both parties for Rubell’s bedroom.
The backdrop for the bold primaries is turquoise, the color of
the ‘50s tiles found in part of the house.
Determined to re-create and use tiles on every floor, Rubell
found Miami’s Cuban Tropic Tile, one of the lat makers of artisanal
Cuban tiles in the United States.
She and Sanders retained many architectural features, including louvered
windows, sliding glass doors, and cement brick, but painted the walls
and exterior white for a brighter, more unified look.
They expanded the open-plan layout so that she could “putter
around the kitchen and socialize with guests having drinks in the living
room.”
More than anything, Rubell says, she “wanted the house to be evocative
of childhood:--specifically her own.
So, in addition to old favorite games, such as Operation and
Candyland, she decorated the house with a set of enormous early-1980s
photographs of her parents and brother by the German photographer Thomas
Ruff. She found them at her
family’s are exhibition space, the Rubelle Family Collection, a
40,000-square-foot former DEA warehouse in Miami that is open to the
public. Not every young
single woman would hang a photograph of her father prominently in her
bedroom, but Rubell thinks it’s funny.
‘Everyone laughs when they see it.,” she says.
“My boyfriend holds his hand up to shield himself from my
father’s glare.”
But then, her youth wasn’t entirely like the rest of ours.
She spent her early teens on the arm of her uncle, Steve Rubell,
the late cofounder of Studio 54, who took her to such places as
Halston’s house for dinner. “I
remember Halston saying to his butler, ‘Bring us napkins and
markers,’” she says. “He
brought them on a silver tray. Andy
Warhol drew Farrah Fawcett’s eye and Ryan O’Neal’s nose.
He looked at me and said, ‘Your family, they collect art,
right?’ And he drew my whole face.”
This portrait, too, hangs in her new home. With it’s buoyant smile and
one eye wide open, it still resembles her.
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