These days many people are crying Wolf-specifically Vicente Wolf, whose name will rank right up with the best designers in the business.
”One of America`s most prolific creators,” gushed Metropolitan Home magazine about Wolf, lauding him for delivering so much personality that
”just one or two (of his pieces) can transform a room.” Architectural Digest picked him for ”AD 100,” a special issue spotlighting ”the world`s finest interior designers.”
Production designer Santo Loquasto looked to the elegant minimalist interiors of Wolf for inspiration for Mia Farrow`s apartment in Woody Allen`s movie ”Alice.”
The 46-year-old designer, a Cuban by birth, has been very busy. In addition to decorating interiors, which he has done for 20-some years (current projects include a three-building residence totaling 18,000 square feet in Hawaii, a large Georgian residence in Nashville and a plantation in Natchez, Miss.), Wolf is branching out with a range of products for the home, making his high-style designs available not only to a moneyed clientele and to-the-trade showrooms but to a department store near you.
In April, Wolf introduced a 30-piece furniture collection for Henredon. The collection was applauded in the trade press for its ”ready-to-wear”
approach: Nothing matches, and everything can, but doesn`t have to, coordinate.
But that`s not all: There are lamps for Paul Hanson; rugs for F. Schumacher & Co.; crystal glasses and vases for Steuben; office furniture for Niedermaier (Wolf uses the pieces in homes too); mirrors for Friedman Brothers; dinnerware for the LS Collection and also for Sasaki, for whom he and former partner Robert Patino designed their still popular ”Windows”
flatware pattern; and more flatware is on the design boards..
Wolf, has done interiors for choreographer Twyla Tharp, fashion photographer Richard Avedon, jewelry designer Elsa Peretti, actress Rita Moreno and couturier Andrew Fezza. The son of upper-middle-class parents in the construction business in Cuba, his father served as a minister in Fidel Castro`s government until becoming disillusioned with the revolution. So in 1961, when Wolf was 16 and his parents were in their late 40s, the family moved to Miami. ”All of a sudden my father was frying hamburgers and my mother mopping floors so that we could get a deduction in rent.”
What disturbed him most was a yard sale that eliminated the few possessions the family had brought with them. ”I couldn`t understand how my mother could sell our things! But it was sell and eat or keep and starve. The motto of my family is survival,” said Wolf, who was in Chicago earlier this month for a conference at the Merchandise Mart.
He began working as a stock boy for a fabric company, then as a salesman for designer showrooms. He went on to assist interior designers, including the late Angelo Donghia, before eventually forming a partnership with Robert Patino. Patino-Wolf lasted 17 years.
His background also taught him to be resourceful in developing a style.
”I started by being a minimalist. The challenge was in doing a lot for a little money . . . You have to be very creative, strive to be a better designer, to keep evolving.”
The impetus to keep evolving pushed Wolf to go out on his own. Although his partnership was enormously successful, it had limitations. ”I wanted to diversify from a high-end clientele to include a wider audience.”
In 1989, Wolf chose a former sewing factory in a working-class neighborhood on West 39th Street, in New York`s garment district for his new office and home. He adapted an egalitarian signature: He and his staff of 11 dress only in black and white. ”I don`t believe in the star system. We`re a team.”
In setting up shop, he wondered how his well-heeled clientele would react to the decidedly un-chic neighborhood. ”But they like it,” Wolf said. ”They feel they`re dealing with an individual, not going for the flash of the Upper East Side, the right building, the right address. A very influential client recently asked, `What is one of your better qualities?` I responded, `I take the subway.` ”
No matter what his address, Wolf continues to carve out a reputation for being impulsive and inventive, often interpreting the old in defining his distinctive minimalist style.
At a cocktail party when he spied a woman in a short chiffon skirt, he thought: ”Wouldn`t that make a wonderful lamp?” Soon a curvy metal silhouette was married to a shirred, skirted lampshade. ”A wonderful combination of hard and soft and, at the risk of sounding pompous, artistic,” says the designer.
His artistry often leads to the unexpected: He created an elegant console with a pair of 19th Century French wire trash receptacles as the base, topping it with Formica. He attached a playful magazine pouch to a clean-cut, straight-lined chair. He modified the scale of a classic Edwardian library chair, making it wide enough to curl into.
Like his furniture, his interiors are minimalistic and monochromatic, often all-white but never too stark. His trademarks include slipcovers and a deft mix of different periods, styles and disparate objects. He collects chairs (from a discarded school chair he found in the street to an 18th Century Italian frame that he paid dearly for at auction), 20th Century photographs, antique architecture tools and his latest passion, miniature topiaries.
Like other talented designers, Wolf sometimes goes against the grain. When he designed a suite of rooms for the prestigious Kips Bay Decorator Showhouse in Manhattan, Wolf countered the trend of ”everybody doing everything to the hilt” by focusing on a mundane problem that owners of old houses readily identify with: bad walls. He swathed the offenders in free-floating, undulating panels of fabric to give the space a liquid quality. Then he furnished sparely but elegantly.
In a living area for Kathy Brynner, Wolf had the temerity to face off a sinuous `50s-inspired sofa (his design, now in production for Henredon) and a bare-bones primitive wooden chair from Afghanistan. In his own loft, Wolf mixes Chippendale, Diego Giacometti iron chairs and a Louis XVI gilded bench
(which he had reproduced by Henredon) with an overscale table draped in white cowhide. Art is propped on the floor, on window ledges. Radiators are left exposed. TVs are stacked like architectural columns. An exercise machine is undisguised.
Silk curtains hang from a sprinkler system.
Such juxtapositions characterize what Wolf calls the new contemporary room. ”All the pieces come from different points of view, draw from different periods and times, all put against clean backgrounds to create the present,” said Wolf. ”I love objects that speak to each other-the same language, but with different accents.”
But don`t look for busy fabrics in his rooms. ”I use my forms as pattern. Each time you move a chair, it forms a different pattern. Stick a chintz on it, and there will come a day when you`ll look at it and say,
`Enough. I want it plain.` ”
But for him, plain never means stilted. ”One thing that put the lid on High Tech was that it took itself too seriously. Also, we cannot live without softness.” And romance. ”Because I`m Latin, I always love romance and a bit of humor.”
Wolf says that evolution is the key to good design. And this serves his restless spirit well.
”Twyla Tharp once said to me, `To stay at the status quo, you have to keep moving.` We don`t eat meat and potatoes every day. We don`t put on the same thing every day or do the same thing at work. So our living spaces should not be static. That`s why I love things propped against a wall. When a picture is hung in a particular place, it dies. You no longer appreciate it after time; it becomes part of a setting. That`s why I love slipcovers and furniture on wheels, objects that are able to be changed and that move around.
”Good design is anything that travels well in time and always looks fresh. A Mies van der Rohe chair, a Charles Eames chair stand on their own, no matter where they`re put, because they have design integrity. Good design doesn`t depend on a gimmick to make a point.”
Wolf says the instant you walk into someone`s home, it speaks. ”Hard-edged spaces say, `Don`t expect to relax too much. I don`t want you to stay too long.` Overly prissy rooms say, `Come in, look, but don`t touch. You might break something.` What it should say is, `Welcome, relax, plop your feet on the table or the ottoman. I want you to be here.` ”
To Wolf, heart makes a home. ”What`s inside is much more important than what surrounds you.”
Wolf doesn`t believe that will change much as we approach the next century. ”The year 2000 is not going to be about spaceships or the Jetsons. The changes will come from science, medicine and microchips. But our lifestyles will be basically the same. What we will want is comfortable, individual spaces that are clean, maintenance-free, with wonderful
combinations of colors and shadings.”
