Freeze Frame

A closer look at the hottest solutions from April

Staff -- Interior Design, 4/1/2004 12:00:00 AM

The layered look

Kelly Wearstler has declared a ban on plain white walls. If she can't color them, she texturizes them. At the Trina Turk shop in Los Angeles, her firm, KWID, installed rose-tinted mirrors on front and rear walls, then added marine-grade plywood screens water-cut in a pattern adapted from a 1940's carpet design.

The process wasn't easy. At 4 by 10 feet, the largest panels didn't fit the walls, and the plywood was a flimsy 1/2 inch thick. Her solution: Once the mirrors went up, she cut the plywood into 32 pieces, stacked them in pairs, and glued them. Held together with mortise-and-tenon joints, then painted white, the screens were ready to be nailed to the wall.

The result is uniquely whimsical—like Turk's silk halter, Giardina. "Retro Redux," page 184. —E.C.

Branching out

Nature infuses everything at Asiate, the restaurant that Tony Chi designed for the Mandarin Oriental, New York. Central Park views fill the 35th-floor space—via full-height windows and mirrored pillars—and a dazzling sculpture of abstract branchlike forms seems to float effortlessly above the main dining room.

The lengths of silvered handblown Murano glass represent a collaboration between Tonychi & Associates and Etkin Fitzgerald Studio. Back from Venice, the glass pieces also required a structural engineer to install them. Each was mounted on a ball-bearing knuckle and attached to a rod of stainless steel that descends from the ceiling anywhere from 3 to 30 inches. "It takes a lot of work," says Chi, "to make something look magical." Abracadabra. "A Step Above," page 192. —S.F.M.