Written by Kathleen Hackett • Styled by Carlos Mota • Photographed by William Waldron
Jeanine Lobell traces her success to a day out with her father in her native Sweden when she was a teenager. “We were walking together on the street, and he pointed to this little hot-dog vendor,” she says of her father, who supported her artistic endeavors from an early age. “He explained that nobody was telling the man to spread the mustard just so for maximum productivity, that he owned that hot-dog stand,” she says. “He said, ‘Honey, you need to get your own hot-dog stand.’”
Ownership seems to come naturally to the gregarious Lobell, a makeup artist whose unapologetically bold color sense rattled the beauty industry when she created Stila, her cosmetics line, 17 years ago. Never one to follow the rules, the free-spirited Lobell shot shimmer and sparkle through her flirty lip, eye, and face products and branded them with sprightly, stylish cartoon women. This was at a time when most companies were putting out low-key brown and beige palettes in sedate and elegant packaging.
Fast-forward to today, and Lobell is still at it, spinning the color wheel fearlessly, though this time the subject happens to be the Park Avenue apartment she shares with her husband, actor Anthony Edwards, their four children, two Chihuahuas, and a pair of parakeets. The family decamped to Manhattan from Los Angeles several years ago. “We lived in a rambling Spanish-style house in L.A.,” says Lobell, “and serene shades seemed to suit it. But I wanted this place to reflect our current life, which is hardly quiet.”
She found a kindred spirit in architect and designer Rafael de Cárdenas, a former fashion and production designer whose interiors, not to mention personality, effect a gravitational pull on the creative (read: risk-taking) crowd. “I rarely need to get formal approval for my choices from my clients,” the designer says, “which says a lot about the kind of people they are. They’re brave, and they don’t want anything expected.”
But Cárdenas admits that when it came to choosing a palette for the 5,000-square-foot space, a full floor in a prewar building achieved by his deft marriage of two apartments, he deferred to the queen of color. “Jeanine is very exacting on that subject, as one might imagine—don’t call it lavender if it’s lilac!” he warns. Indeed, it got to the point where Cárdenas found himself suggesting that Lobell might want to exercise a little color restraint, atypical advice from such an audacious designer.
Then again, Lobell and Edwards are nothing if not gutsy. They married in Reno—on the drive back to California from a getaway weekend—on impulse. He runs the New York City marathon every year to raise money for his favorite charity, Shoe4Africa, which is funding the first children’s hospital to be built in sub-Saharan Africa. Having sold Stila, Lobell is now Creative Director of Kevyn Aucoin Beauty, filling the very big shoes left behind by the beloved founder of the brand. She is also overseeing a line of cosmetics for the über-hip boutique Opening Ceremony.
This is a couple who, not long ago, trekked around the world with their son and three daughters—ages five to 13 at the time—for a full year. Along the way, they purchased a painting of poppies, and the living room’s color scheme was born. “That gorgeous fuchsia? I just had to live with it,” exclaims Lobell. And her husband? “I like what Jeanine likes,” Edwards says wryly. Not that the actor doesn’t have his own design genes—his maternal grandfather was the architect of the original Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, California.
That flamboyant fuchsia shows up again in the generous foyer, a room that hints at both what Lobell calls her split personality and what lies beyond. The supersaturated Venetian-plaster walls express her penchant for glamour, a pair of simple lamps her lack of pretension, the 1960s wall-spanning credenza her love for midcentury design, and an oil painting brought back from India her informal approach and passion for the exotic. For every space with eye-popping vertical surfaces—the moody purply-blue bedroom, the kitchen’s acid-green cabinets, the exuberant chinoiserie wallpaper in the dining room, the hallway’s playful field of green—there is another in which the walls recede so that the furnishings and art can dazzle. A pair of bottle-green chandeliers pops against the petal-pink walls of the living room. In the couple’s adjoining offices, paintings, drawings, collages, and photos—male portraits in his, females in hers—are hung salon style. A heavy cherry-red Samburu bead necklace brought back from Africa holds pride of place in Edwards’s office. “In every room there are one or two pieces that don’t really go in the conventional sense,” says Cárdenas, “but that’s why the place is so exciting—because it’s just harmonious enough.”
Weaving together such a broad range of passions might throw a less intrepid designer off, but for Cárdenas, it’s as it should be. “A home should be a distillation of your interests, of who you really are. If you’re happy with your life, your space will reflect that,” he says. Looks like the Lobell-Edwards clan is positively exuberant.
No comments:
Post a Comment