Lenora Lipschutz, the mother of Suzanne Lipschutz, has strong opinions about her New York daughter`s weekend place in the Art Deco district of Miami Beach, not far from the North Miami Beach apartment that Lenora, formerly of Brooklyn, has occupied for 18 years.
”Listen, it`s her life,” Lenora said. ”It isn`t for me. I live in a luxury apartment.”
The daughter, who owns Secondhand Rose in Manhattan, a store specializing in 20th Century American furniture and decorative art, is but one of a new generation of New Yorkers who are slowly rediscovering the delights of the Art Deco district.
The square-mile stretch of fanciful, gaily painted Art Deco hotels and apartment buildings, built between 1930 and 1940, has been a project of the Miami Design Preservation League, which had the district listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979.
The district has about 800 low-rise Art Deco buildings, 200 of them restored or newly painted, others still in a state of disrepair.
They bear names such as the Siesta, Flamingo and the Enjoie and streamlined silhouettes that resemble Flipper`s.
For Suzanne Lipschutz, who spent many years vacationing at the fabled Fontainebleau, the Miami Beach hotel designed by Morris Lapidus, the combination of the salty, humid air, the sea and the unspoiled canary-yellow apartment house designed in 1936 by Henry Hohauser is drenched in fantasy.
”I`m a Jewish girl,” she said. ”And it`s Miami Beach.”
A coterie of New Yorkers
Suzanne, 47, has been joined in the Deco district by a coterie of New Yorkers with an artistic bent.
Among them are Patricia Field, a boutique owner; Frances Grill, founder and president of Click Model Management; Robert Bishop, director of the Museum of American Folk Art; and Tony Goldman, a restaurateur and real-estate developer who has bought 18 buildings in the district and has opened a fashionable French and American regional restaurant called Lucky`s, complete with Philippe Starck chairs, at the Park Central Hotel.
To them Miami Beach is an ideal weekend getaway, particularly in winter.
”It`s a wonderful place to shoot photography,” said Grill, who decorated her apartment with plaster walls depicting crabs, fish and other underwater creatures in bas-relief.
Miami Beach, she believes, has become a mecca for fashion photography, especially among West German and French fashion editors and photographers, who come in vans and turn the beach into ”one big outdoor studio.”
Lipschutz`s offbeat design gospel fits in well with the spirit of the Deco district. It goes something like this:
– ”Eliminate white.”
– ”Let it evolve.”
– ”When the maid breaks something, give her a raise.”
Her one-bedroom apartment is on a residential street characterized by buildings with fluted pillars and scalloped edges (on the outside) and horizontal louvered windows and fireplaces with ornamental pelican friezes (on the inside).
”It`s not for a lot of people,” said Lipschutz, who was wearing the fashion equivalent of Fiesta ware, a 1930s striped yellow, red and blue dress formerly owned by Gypsy Rose Lee, with a 1940s Florida tourist apron thrown on for effect. ”It`s a city that happens to be on a beach. But the scale is wonderful. And I wanted the summer all year round.”
Her kind of neighborhood
As she spoke, Lipschutz gazed dreamily at her view: a former motel from the 1950s with shocking turquoise railings. Across the street is the community pool, where, Lipschutz said, there are ”beautiful old gentlemen playing handball and old ladies doing their aqua exercises.”
Lipschutz bought the apartment last year for $50,000, in part because she ”couldn`t afford the Hamptons.” She spent less than $2,500-”easily,”
she said-on the interior. Many of the Art Deco details remained, including the wooden floors and the kitchen hardware.
The walls were in a state of utter disrepair. ”They were peeling and cracking and had been painted post-modern colors,” Lipschutz said. ”The namby-pamby pink had to go. My personality is not pastel.”
Undeterred, she set about on her own interpretation of Miami Beach style, in collaboration with Carlos Alves, a 25-year-old Miami Beach mosaic artist who grew up with the Latin tradition of ornamental tile work.
Together, they devised an extravagant mosaic scheme for the fireplace, the dining room archway and the kitchen.
In place of white plaster, Alves created a multicolored fireplace frieze made from antique and handmade tile, hand-painted Italian Capodimonte candlesticks (embellished with roses), and shells, including oyster, whelk and cowrie.
The man who sells the Capodimonte pottery in the nearby Lincoln Mall was rather mystified when Lipschutz and Alves asked him for all his broken pieces. ”We paid him $400 for it,” she said.
Once Lipschutz bought the apartment, she decided to leave the walls as they were, forsaking wallpaper. She sponged the living room walls in mottled hues of ocher and muted green, painting the ceiling what she called
”eyeshadow blue.”
`I love opulent decay`
The effect is somewhat reminiscent of Pompeii. ”I love opulent decay,”
she said.
To create swags on the walls, she stenciled half-moon shapes using half a pie tin. The swags are punctuated with plastic grapes and Capodimonte roses from broken candlesticks.
Running along the bottom of one wall is a 1930s geometric border.
Around the room is furniture from the 1920s through 1960s, including two Paul Frankl tiered end tables and a Pierre Paulin chair.
Her design philosophy forsakes literal interpretation.
”There is so much architectural fantasizing in Florida,” said Lipschutz, who has a fine-arts degree from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.
”There are so many styles and directions, from tropical to Mediterranean.” Her approach has been to mix styles, taking her cues from the state`s eclectic design history.
Though Lipschutz is an inveterate shopper-”when she has to have it, she has to have it,” Alves said-much of the furniture has been bought from flea markets or salvaged from alleys, which she frequently cruises on the night before garbage collection in Alves` truck.
She found her 1930s dining-room table in a junkyard. A rusted wrought-iron side table was rescued from an alley. ”I couldn`t find a better finish than rust,” Lipschutz said.
”Look at it, ” she added, touching the legs, which wobbled like Jell-O. ”I think this table is too gorgeous.”
Alves` piece de resistance may be found en route to the kitchen, in an archway meant to be what he calls a ”celestial happening.” The 1920s iron chandelier and 1950s chairs, made of wrought iron and grommeted canvas, are offset by a curving arched ceramic explosion that includes Chinese porcelain Buddhas without heads.
In the kitchen Alves fashioned a playful ceramic collage on the counter and back splashes. It is crafted from antique and handmade tiles, majolica squiggles and projecting orange plates and goblets. The glazes are sky blue, flamingo pink, canary yellow, chartreuse and violet, set into pink, blue and yellow grout.
Lipschutz decorated the walls with antique German wallpaper meant to resemble tile. The wallpaper creates a sequence of checkerboards in yellow, black and white, superimposed in unexpected places with torn sheets of sky-blue wallpaper.
The place is full of small touches, such as a 1940s fold-up canasta table for that essential Miami Beach ritual. Lipschutz placed mussel shells in the soap dish in the bathroom, their lavender insides precisely matching the vase of lavender Capodimonte roses on the sink.
”The building is Art Deco,” her mother said with a sigh; ”so you have to expect these things down here.” –
