Romancing the Stone

Edie Cohen -- Interior Design, 3/1/2007 12:00:00 AM

Hicks Stone wasn't necessarily rebellious. But he did entertain thoughts of pursuing professions other than architecture. Marine biology was one teenage enthusiasm, law another. The latter "mercifully faded," he says. "Those types of books don't have pictures." On a serious note, though, he certainly had a tough act to follow: specifically his father, Edward Durell Stone.

The architect of the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., to name just two highly visible projects, he died in 1978, right after his son graduated from Hamilton College in upstate New York. "That's when I decided to become an architect, and I got into Harvard," Hicks Stone recounts. Facetious again: "I know Dad didn't pay anyone off."

After practicing in Boston with Stephen L. Faulk and Associates, he came to New York to work for Johnson/Burgee Architects. In 1991, he founded Stone Architecture, which now has four employees. "I don't want my staff to get big," he says. "I love working on design every day."

Most of that design is residential, including a renovation of his childhood New York town house, an 1890's brownstone that his father transformed with characteristic latticework. Stone Architecture is currently renovating three apartments in New York and building a house in Rockport, Maine, for former This Old House host Steve Thomas; the firm is also building the 30,000-square-foot Photographic Centre in Palm Beach, Florida.

Unexpectedly, most of those projects are traditional, but that's his clients' pick. He has two contemporary designs on the boards, too. In Cornwall, Connecticut, glass and fieldstone define a pavilionlike house with a transparent living room projecting over the wooded landscape. And there's an Albert Frey–inspired courtyard house set, fittingly, at the base of the San Jacinto Mountains in Rancho Mirage, California.

Clockwise from top left: Hicks Stone grew up in this New York town house—which his father, Edward Durell Stone, bought and redesigned in 1956—and updated it for a client in 2005. A watercolor shows the 3,500-square-foot house Hicks Stone is building in Cornwall, Connecticut. Spray-painted disks, originally Coca-Cola signs, serve as diffusers for lighting in the New York house's kitchen, where his father's concrete grille protects the window. In 1958, a 4-year-old Hicks Stone played with his mother, Maria, and his father.

This page: Hicks Stone replaced the metal roof of the New York house's terrace with plastic panels and paved it with Carrara marble tiles. Tord Boontje light fixtures hang above the Eero Saarinen table and Harry Bertoia chairs.

Clockwise from top left: The Connecticut house's living room has a 17-foot ceiling. Edward Durell Stone sat for this portrait in 1958. In 1954, he completed the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi. Hicks Stone designed the Inn at Old Bahama Bay on Grand Bahama in 1997. His father built this house in Mount Kisco, New York, in 1933. He and Philip L. Goodwin collaborated on New York's Museum of Modern Art, 1939.