Popular restaurateur.
Beauty products CEO. Luxury hotelier. Supermodel. Art visionaries.
Top-of-the-line chef. Work is their passion and livelihood. 10-hour-plus days? Easily.
Here’s how they live when the workday is done.
A MODEL ACT
JASLENE GONZALEZ
“America’s Next Top Model” winner
— What’s new: After her Seventeen magazine cover last July, Gonzalez became the face of Lot 29 clothes (see her at lot29.com) and new spokesperson for Liz Claiborne’s “Love Is Not Abuse” organization.
— Home: Her family’s four-bedroom, 3-1/2-bath Colonial-style house in Bolingbrook. Expansive patio, her mother’s much-loved flower garden, a finished basement and a comfy living room with a big flat screen TV.
— Puerto Rican-born Gonzalez, nicknamed the “Cha Cha Diva” when she was competing for the “America’s Next Top Model” crown, chose to hightail it back to her grandmother’s house in Humboldt Park, after spending only her junior year of high school in Bolingbrook.
“I actually enjoy hearing cars going by playing loud salsa music!” says the former college counselor, comparing city life to the tranquil suburb. “I think this is a great place to raise a family; it’s just that I am all about where I grew up.”
Gonzalez credits her success to the strength she draws from the “morals and values” of her old Hispanic neighborhood on the Northwest Side, and her big extended family there. In “Top Model’s” final episode Gonzalez summed it up: “I’m not your girl-next-door. I’m your girl-down-the-block-in-your-‘hood.” However, since winning the contest (along with the Seventeen magazine spread, a $100,000 Cover Girl deal, and a contract with Elite Modeling) and moving to New York City, there is nothing she craves more than coming home to Bolingbrook for a dose of R&R and the opportunity to visit with her two brothers, Steven, 7 and Javier, 19, and her 2-year-old sister, Amaris (pictured).
“I’m so happy my Mom bought this house, surrounded by such good people. We get on her, though, because she can’t stop decorating it,” says Gonzalez. “We always say, ‘Thank you, Mom, for making our house so beautiful, but would you please stop?’ “To be fair, her mother is a professional interior designer.
–Lisa Cregan
THE ART IMPRESARIOS
KAVI GUPTA
Owner, Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago
JESSICA MOSS
Curatorial assistant, Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago
— What’s new: Gupta just opened a second eponymous gallery in Leipzig, Germany, and is producing a group of international art fairs, named Volta, to run in Basel, Switzerland, in June and New York in March.
— Home: 4,000-square-foot loft in River West with a 1,000-square-foot deck. Striking steel staircase; sleek, state-of-the-art kitchen; spa-quality master bathroom.
— Art is both mistress and muse to the couple, who do field research and mount exhibitions professionally, and apply that same intellectual vigor to their own collection. Off-hours, they live above “the store.” He built the home in 2001 atop a warehouse he renovated to house four galleries, including his own, and she moved in two years ago.
The view is centered on 333 Wacker Drive for nostalgia’s sake. “My father [a structural engineer] worked on it, and I worked in it,” explains Gupta, who was an investment banker at John Nuveen before he opened his gallery 10 years ago. Inside, everything is about the art. “It’s designed to show off the collection and allow us to entertain,” he says. To that end, there are high ceilings with crisp white walls, a gourmet kitchen and dining area, and an expansive deck.
When Moss entered the picture, things changed. She came with her own collection, which is long on self-taught and Chicago Imagist works, a warmer aesthetic to temper his minimalist tendencies and a green thumb. The deck became a verdant rooftop garden and counterpoint to the minimalist interior. Inside, they added a library for her collection of art history tomes, and the art installations became collaborative. “We’re always getting new pieces or lending them out to shows, so we have to rearrange things frequently,” Gupta says. Adds Moss: “We both have strong opinions about where the art should go.”
The upshot: “We negotiate,” he says.
The benefit: “We open each other’s eyes to new things,” she says.
–Lisa Skolnik
THE 5-STAR HOTELIER
DAVID PISOR
CEO, Elysian Hotels & Resorts
— What’s new: He recently purchased Aspen’s iconic, historic Hotel Jerome with a group of partners.
— Home: 5,600-square-foot, three-story Bucktown house on 2.5 city lots that has traditional bones and transitional furnishings.
— Pisor will be in an unusual position when his Elysian Hotel opens in the Gold Coast in November 2008. “Most five-star hotels aren’t run by owner-operators. Guests will benefit from our ability to do whatever it takes . . . without any interference . . . to make this property intimate and luxurious,” he maintains. It’s a claim he and his wife, Hilary, make good on in their own home, where comfort and closeness envelop and bond the whole family. “We have a huge fireplace in the kitchen, cook together whenever we can and eat dinner together every night,” says Hilary. The hearth was inspired by Pisor’s aunt, renowned Bay-area chef Alice Waters. But their closeness only starts at the dinner table. “The kids’ bedrooms are all on the same floor as ours, and we have a bathtub and shower that holds all six of us,” says David.
–Lisa Skolnik
COMING CLEAN
CINDY MELK Founder/creative director, H20+
— What’s new: Continued global expansion.
— Home: 4,000-square-foot, four-story Gold Coast graystone and coach house built in 1871. Historically intact Victorian architecture outside, clean-lined rooms inside.
— “I strive for style with substance and beauty without pretension,” says Melk, who is partial to sleek-lined, form-fitting clothes “you can really live in” and little makeup. Not surprisingly, she matches her home, which is filled with spare, monochromatic furnishings. “I’ve always had an affinity for minimalism,” she says. She acted on it when she hooked up with Florian Depenthal, an abstract expressionist artist, four years ago. Designer Douglas Levine helped revamp the place to be more streamlined but still functional for a family with two children–Logan, 9, and Hayden, 15 months–and neutral enough to showcase Depenthal’s large-scale, colorful works. “Everything is white. The question I always get is, how do I keep it clean,” she says. How? “Encase the kids in bubble wrap.”
–Lisa Skolnik
ATTENTION GETTER
DONNIE MADIA Restaurateur and nightlife impresario/ Blackbird, Avec, The Violet Hour, Sonotheque
— What’s new: The Violet Hour, on North Damen Street, was dubbed the country’s most exciting bar by Food & Wine magazine just days after opening. It’s a place where drinks are so fine-tuned that bartenders add finishing touches of flavor with eyedroppers, and even ice is made to order.
— Home: 1,400-square-foot West Town loft (one bedroom, one bath) in a circa 1910 former peanut factory.10-foot high ceilings, ivory pickled floors, a 16-foot-long black granite kitchen countertop, exposed brick walls, collection of mid-Century chairs.
— Not only could you eat off the floor here, it might be the best meal you’ve ever had. Madia, a partner in Blackbird and Avec, two of Chicago’s most celebrated restaurants, is all about keeping things very, very clean. He attributes that to a lifetime of dealing with attention deficit disorder. “I had problems paying attention in school,” he confides, “and I learned that when things are clean, organized and pulled together, I am less distracted.”
Countless fine-diners have benefited from Madia’s affliction. The luminous, stripped-down interiors at Blackbird and Avec are never permitted to distract from the outstanding cuisine, though Madia believes that functional decisions still should have beautiful side effects. His favorite thing in his apartment is an 18-foot-long, 8-foot-high walnut bedroom wardrobe (pictured) that was designed by Madia’s good friend, Chicago furniture designer Michael Koehler. “I had a makeshift clothes rack until I could afford this,” Madia says. “Everything has a place; there are drawers and shelves and lots of rods for hanging. I feel so happy to have a great piece of architecture to conceal my clothes.
“When he planned the apartment’s layout in 1999, his goal was to purify the design elements down to the minimum: “There are really only two rooms here. One room is a combination big dining room, living room and kitchen, and the other is my bedroom.” A bathroom enclosed within an intriguing architectural cube divides the two spaces. Madia admits that he isn’t here much except to sleep. “I am always working,” he says, not entirely unhappily. His new establishment, The Violet Hour, is named after a T.S. Eliot description of the shadowy time between dusk and dark. Asked how his apartment looks during that pre-dinner hour, Madia says: “I wouldn’t know. I am usually at Blackbird, watching the sun set over the expressway.”
–Lisa Cregan
