Stunning is the only word for the Lucite, gold and mother-of-pearl paradise that is the duplex apartment of Morris Lapidus, the Miami Beach hotel designer whose Fontainebleau was once proudly described by its owner as ”the world`s most pretentious hotel.”
”I wanted people to walk in and drop dead,” the retired 85-year-old architect says of his celebrated hotel lobbies.
”Some did,” replies his wife, Beatrice, who is 79.
The Lapiduses are lunching on chicken salad sandwiches and carrot sticks at an oval Lucite-topped table for 10 designed by Lapidus. Overhead hangs a jungle of prisms: one of his famous ”ripping” chandeliers, as he calls them. The table, set with gold-plated flatware, nestles amid curvaceous walls completely covered with Capiz shells, which shimmer as luxuriantly as a gold lame bikini. The table is set off by a semicircle of decorative gold-leafed, fluted columns, classic Lapidus architectural touches known to him and his followers as ”bean poles.”
Lapidus retired in 1984. But his decorative, dramatic style, once described by a critic as ”the epitome of the apogee,” is undiminished in the 1,200-square-foot apartment the Lapiduses have shared for 18 years. ”This is a treasure house,” says Lapidus, who since retirement has traded in his signature bow ties for casual batik shirts. (But the bow ties will live forever in the patterned marble floors in the lobby of the Fontainebleau.)
”I`d wanted a mink,” Mrs. Lapidus says, explaining her initial reaction to the seven-room cooperative apartment. ”But my husband said a gorgeous home comes first.”
Gorgeous is something Lapidus knows something about. He has designed more than 200 hotels around the world. Excoriated by critics-the Fontainebleau was once called ”the nation`s grossest national product”-his ”modern French chateau” designs for the Fontainebleau, which opened in 1954, and later for the Eden Roc and the Americana fly in the face of Bauhaus modernism.
They have since become renegade popular landmarks, appreciated anew by a younger generation of architects. In an open letter in the Italian design magazine Domus, for example, Alessandro Mendini gushed over Lapidus`
”acrobatic virtuosity.” He said, ”We believe the method of which you are a precursor is as necessary as it is dangerous.”
WHY BE SUBTLE?
Architectural understatement is not Lapidus` style. This is the man who put live alligators in a terrarium in the lobby of the Americana so guests would ”know they were in Florida.”
His hotel designs took their visual cues from Hollywood movies. However, Lapidus designed his home to be livable and practical. The apartment, which overlooks Biscayne Bay, is in a white high-rise building he designed in the late 1960s. It is a dazzling combination of grand gestures and tiny details.
”It represents the things we have enjoyed in the past and the present,”
he says.
The rooms, each a gilded fantasy island, are filled with a welter of objects garnered from the couple`s travels. Nearly every detail has been designed by the architect, from the 1950s geometric plastic lighting fixtures to the triple mirrors in Mrs. Lapidus` bathroom to the pink silk pillows that double as headboards in the French-inspired master bedroom.
This may explain why the couple were bored during a 108-day world cruise recently. A port has to be pretty exotic to compete with paintings, shower stalls, slipcovers, closets, cabinetry, knobs, lighting fixtures and plastic- bead draperies, all designed by Morris Lapidus.
Lapidus, who studied architecture at Columbia University with intentions of becoming a stage designer, was born in Odessa in Russia, and grew up in New York. He began his career in retail design, pioneering the use of bright colors, lights and sweeping curvilinear forms to sell merchandise. He is a longtime adherent to ”emotionalism” in architecture. An anthropology enthusiast (he recently completed a book-length manuscript on the history of man), Lapidus says he believes humans have an innate need to adorn.
Lapidus can`t abide a straight line. So the apartment has a winding staircase (”A staircase isn`t a staircase unless it`s curved.”), a multitude of ”woggles” (shapes with ”no beginning and no end”) and numerous cove-lighted hollows (He calls them ”cheese holes.”). It also abounds in surprising lighting fixtures that follow his ”moth theory,” that people are attracted to light. In one sitting area, for instance, a series of delicate globe ceiling lights subtly illuminates a white ceiling of simulated ostrich hide.
As one might expect, opulent materials are everywhere. Floors are of white marble tile (easy to clean). Cabinets are screened in peekaboo gold wire mesh. In the living room, an overscale semicircular 12-foot sofa of yellow silk (the Lapiduses` favorite place for reading Sherlock Holmes) faces a coffee table whose base is a gilded winged ram. In the bedroom, floor-to-ceiling closets in Louis XIV style have knobs of crystal and gold plate on doors that are covered in pink silk with gold grillwork ”for ventilation.”
A PLACE FOR EVERYTHING
A sense of teamwork is everywhere, particularly in the numerous inventive ways Lapidus has devised for storing and displaying his wife`s bibelots and accessories. ”Working in small spaces forces you to do many unusual things,” he says. Among them are hidden cabinets on rollers in the dining room that house Mrs. Lapidus` antique lobster forks and other silver pieces (247 in all). Pull-out drawers in an immense closet store 30 cases of gloves.
”In designing for myself, I had only one client to please: my wife,”
Lapidus says. ”We took out the walls and built it our way.”
A spatial wizard, he designed a wall that opens up into a record cabinet. Lucite and mirrors dematerialize small spaces brimming with mother-of-pearl objects and other collectibles. The freewheeling approach reaches a crescendo with the baby grand piano, its mahogany painted over with white lacquer and gold leaf.
If the apartment reveals touches of the theatrical, this does not seem to bother Lapidus: ”I want people to feel something. If two people are walking by one of my buildings and one says to the other, `Did you notice that building?` and the other says, `What building?` I`ve failed. But if he looks at it and says, `Oh my god,` or, `That monstrosity,` I am glad. Because he noticed me.”
Lapidus says the first time he felt ”an emotional surge” about architecture was during a childhood visit to Coney Island. ”I was standing on the elevated platform just as dusk was falling,” he recalls, ”and the lights went on. To me it was the most beautiful sight I`d seen. Of course, I knew it was hankypank, a circus and showmanship. But to a child of 6, it was all the wonders of the world. I never outgrew it.”
Lapidus has been busy in retirement, traveling and writing. (He is at work on a novel; ”Bea said to write something with sex in it.”) Although he does not spend much time looking back, he takes some satisfaction in the current rediscovery of ornament.
And he can still get choked up about the Fontainebleau.
”I`m not an innovator,” he explains at the end of his ”50-cent tour”
of the apartment. ”I wasn`t the founder of a style. I`m just an architect who happened to be carried away by his emotions. I think you can do that with architecture.” –
