Pennsylvania Interior Design and Philadelphia Home Design

Pennsylvania Interior Design and Philadelphia Home Design

Pennsylvania interior designer firm, DA Interior Design provides an interior decorator that is much more than a home designer.

Our professional staff will work with you during the many architectural stages so your luxury home gets the custom feel and design that you have always dreamt of. We use custom furniture and work as consultants on everything, including lighting.

2005 Winner American Society of Interior Designers Design Excellence Awards New or Remodeled Bathroom.

2005 Winner American Society of Interior Designers Design Excellence Awards Special Function Space-Home Office.

The Value of D.A. Interior Design’s Services:
• Quality overview of entire project
• Experience in both interior and exterior end use dynamics
• Recognition and avoidance of common pitfalls of construction/interior planning
• Establishes strong design team in conjunction with Architect and Building professionals
• Provides continuity in all phases from planning, development, construction, finished product
• Access to local, national and international building and moveable items on the market
• We make your home uniquely yours!

Our Philadelphia Pennsylvania interior design and home design firm is the interior decorator you have always wanted! Our professional home designer team will work with your architectural luxury home architect and builder to maximize the potential of your home design. Our staff is fully involved from the construction process, lighting design, all the way to the custom furniture selection, so you know our consultants will do a great job! Choose DA Interior Design today!

The Entry Way

The apartment’s late-seventies-luxury interior architecture was done by Lobel’s close friend Greg Sharp, who was responsible for the white-granite floors, track lighting, and the pièce de résistance: the massive wood-veneered central cylinder that houses Lobel’s walk-in closet (it peeks out at the end of the hallway). In the entry way is a serigraph by James Rosenquist. The guest bathroom, right, features massive African slate tiles and a teak sink.
(Photo: David Allee)

Continue To:
The Kitchen
The Cabinetry
The Bedroom
The Sitting Area and Bachelor Closet
The Living Room

The Next Mid-Century

The good news: There’s a hot new period to collect. The bad news: It’s the eighties. Karl Springer, Angelo Donghia, and the Michael Taylor pillow chop are back.

By David Colman

It feels like 1984: Evan Lobel’s living and dining room, with Angelo Donghia dining chairs and a Charles Hollis Jones glass-and-Lucite dining table. The sofa, from Christian Liaigre, is new but consistent with the period’s sleek, low, luxe aesthetic.
(Photo: David Allee)

Looking back at the pop landscape of the early eighties can provoke pangs of dread. Running shoes on working women? Asymmetrical haircuts and eyeliner on men? Black Pirelli tile on the floor, gray carpet on the wall, neon color splashes on everything?

Stay calm. The mid-century revival didn’t mean resuscitating poodle skirts and the Technicolor palette, and there’s good design lurking beneath all that mousse. After many prestigious furniture companies went under or slashed quality in the mid-seventies recession, some of the best design went private. Designers-cum-decorators including New Yorkers Karl Springer and Angelo Donghia and Californians Charles Hollis Jones and Michael Taylor (widely acknowledged as the man who popularized the pillow-denting styling flourish that became known as “the chop”) routinely had lavish work custom-made for clients. Twenty-five years later, there’s a lode of interesting, beautifully crafted pieces still awaiting a wide audience.

Just as the mid-modern revival was fueled by enthusiastic dealers like Mark McDonald, circa-1980 design has the New York furniture dealer Evan Lobel squarely in its gold-plated corner. “I love the late seventies and eighties,” says Lobel. He’s even writing a book on Springer, his favorite designer, who’s best known for cladding simple but dramatic pieces of furniture in sharkskin and python. Subtle they’re not. “There’s a certain decadence to that era that I find really appealing. The scale tends to be large, and the materials tend to be luxe and rich, which makes the pieces themselves larger than life.”

And if his new Bond Street store doesn’t make the moment’s appeal clear, Lobel’s splashy Union Square apartment does. Outfitted with white granite floors, beige-draped windows and walls, and enough track lighting to melt a glacier, the apartment is the perfect place to showcase the oversize, Chablis-and-brie-fueled extremes of which Lobel is so enamored. The sum total is that rare thing—a very polished bachelor’s apartment, harking back to a time before mixing became the predominant aesthetic and done was not a four-letter word. The centerpiece is a massive Christian Liaigre sofa, ornamented with two giant Missoni-esque pillows, meticulously chopped. It’s the perfect place to sit and contemplate the meteorlike chunk of chrysocolla, one of Lobel’s favorite possessions.

He takes the eighties commitment only so far, though (no razor-blade marks on the massive coffee table). Lobel’s primary vice is thoroughly contemporary. “I’m a workaholic,” he says. “I just want someplace fantastic to come home to.”

Continue To:
The Kitchen
The Entry Way
The Cabinetry
The Bedroom
The Sitting Area and Bachelor Closet
The Living Room

The Next Dakota

French starchitect Jean Nouvel’s 40 Mercer reimagines the quintessential New York apartment house downtown, with river views.

By David Colman

Left, Jean Nouvel in one of 40 Mercer’s apartments, many of which have either red or blue glass accent windows. Right, looking up at the mammoth blue-glass-louvered brise-soleil at the top of the building’s Broadway façade, a reimagined cornice that refers to the neighboring nineteenth-century rooflines.
(Photo: Todd Eberle)

Breaking ground is all well and good, but it can also be argued that the best architects are those who give into that most human urge: to reproduce.

That thought is crystallized in famed French architect Jean Nouvel’s gleaming new Soho apartment house, 40 Mercer, a vision in red, blue, steel, and wood. Quieter, cleverer, and more lavish than Richard Meier’s Perry Street towers, 40 Mercer pays homage not only to its neighboring nineteenth-century cast-iron buildings (and their fifteenth-century Florentine forebears) but to a host of twentieth-century greats: Mondrian, Barragan, Mies van der Rohe. And yet it is utterly seductive as a unique and intriguing work of architecture.

There are a thousand little points of reference. The bracketed cornice on the east façade and the boxy, planar Palladian windows on the rear are a reference to nearby Broadway façades. Inside, the wood-and-stainless-steel kitchens nod to Eames, and the sleek, multiple-veneered and back-painted glass-tile bathrooms recall Parisian Art Deco luxury. Those touches might be lost on some, although not on Todd Eberle, one of today’s best-known architectural photographers and a contributor at Vanity Fair. For him, 40 Mercer was love at first sight. He and longtime boyfriend Richard Pandiscio were among the first people to move into the building late last month; these photos document the move.

“I love how Nouvel references the history of Soho and how seriously he took the responsibility of putting a building in that historic area,” said Eberle, who is more used to photographing starchitect buildings that spring up like magic mushrooms, irrespective of place. “This isn’t an arrogant, arriviste building,” he said. “There’s a soul in this building, and that comes from Nouvel’s dialogue with the history around it.”

Of course, one might expect Eberle to be charitably inclined to 40 Mercer, given that Pandiscio—the marketing mind behind the Neue Galerie, Cipriani Wall Street, and the Urban Glass House—has also done 40 Mercer’s branding campaign.

But even buying one of the building’s smaller apartments— a hardly humble,1,700-square-foot two-bedroom enfilade and the only one whose windows have both red and blue panes of the colored glass that makes the building so Mondrian-esque—was a severe financial stretch, a testament to both men’s affinity for the place. It also makes a supreme location for the couple’s collection of Donald Judd furniture and sculpture.

Even now, when all the apartments are long sold and Pandiscio could easily stop gushing, he says that his initial sales pitch of world-class luxury totally missed the mark. “It wasn’t until the place was more or less done that I really got in it, and got to see that Nouvel is all about light and reflection and volume and proportion,” he says. “I felt like I had kind of failed.” Hardly.

The Library and a View of the Building

Left, a massive Donald Judd library table and chairs (soon to be joined by other pieces) have an ideal home in Eberle and Pandiscio’s apartment. Right, view of the building.
(Photo: Todd Eberle)

Building Views

Views of the building, inside and out.
(Photo: Todd Eberle)

Touches of Mondrian

Left, the building’s kitchens, finished with a variety of beautiful woods, recall the shelving designed by Charles and Ray Eames. Right, the building’s references to Mondrian are playful but contribute to its overall sense of serenity.
(Photo: Todd Eberle)

The Next Everything

The Next White

Some new renters are perfectly satisfied with slapping a fresh coast of paint on the walls. One modern-furniture collector took things a lot further.
By Alexandra Lange

WORKac papered walls, the ceiling, and doors with their custom circular pattern to make the existing ugly moldings and hardware disappear. The Berjan Pot pendant lamp from Design Within Reach added another circle. An Elizabeth Peyton self-portrait hangs above a Superstudio griddled bench bought at Moss.
(Photo: Adam Friedberg)

For someone who owned one of the first Bugaboos, is part of the Architecture and Design Committee at the Museum of Modern Art, and shops the Milan furniture fair, living in a low-ceilinged postwar box apartment is unacceptable. But that was the position Sharon Coplan Hurowitz, a private art adviser, found herself in when a pipe burst in her Fifth Avenue apartment. She, her husband, and two young children had to vacate—fast. Twenty-four hours later, she had a deposit on a nearby rental and had called MoMA design curator Paola Antonelli for a list of up-and-coming New York architects who would work within her time frame (yesterday) and her budget, which she describes as “modest-slash-laughable.” “I wanted to start a dialogue with someone doing interesting work but to engage them now, when I could still have access,” Hurowitz says, which is a good strategy for collecting furniture as well as architects.

At the top of the short list was WORKac, whose principals Amale Andraos and Dan Wood worked together at Rem Koolhaas’s office and will soon be known for their Diane Von Furstenberg headquarters on West 14th Street (opening this summer). “We met at her flooded apartment,” says Andraos. “It was in a very sad state, except of course for the incredible furniture and art just laid out on the floor.” Taken with Hurowitz’s collection—focused on European designers from the nineties to the present, Boontje to Wanders—and her fearless decorating sense (she’d already decided the bedrooms were to be blue, green, and violet), they agreed to her conditions. The family moved into a hotel, and WORKac got down to business.

Since all the work in the apartment had to be reversible—remember, this is a rental—they could radically alter only the surfaces. But Hurowitz gave them the go-ahead to be as radical as possible, using just immediately available materials. First order: custom-dyed Stark carpet in the bedrooms, with paint picked from Janovic Plaza to match. (The carpets, dyed in Europe, were the last items installed. Otherwise, the renovation might have taken only six weeks.) Hurowitz had already lived with a very bright green in her former apartment, so for the floors, WORKac decided to spin their way through the color wheel of available vinyl, adding yellow and red to the cool tones of the private spaces.

For the public spaces, Andraos and Wood began playing with floor patterns in industrial Lonseal vinyl, keeping the dimensions of Hurowitz’s major pieces—the Bouroullec brothers’ limited-edition Cabane (the trellis over the sofa), Thomas Demand’s wall-size photograph Poll—in mind. “Circles seemed really fitting, like spotlights for the furniture,” says Andraos.

More circles were used in the hall, a formal, windowless space that feeds to all the other rooms. Hurowitz originally wanted to paper it in a limited-edition John Baldessari wallpaper (she’s writing his catalogue raisonné of prints and multiples) but realized that would be a waste. So Andraos and Wood drew a custom circular pattern on their computer, and had it printed at Archetonic Design in Florida. Door-to-door, one week. “It was very liberating that everything had an ephemeral aspect,” says Hurowitz. “The joke is that we have been here for a year. And given how aggressive real-estate prices are, we are obviously going to be here longer.”

Continue To:
Dining Room
Daughter’s Room
The Living Room
Son’s Room
The Master Bedroom

Home Design: What’s Next

By David Colman

Philip Johnson’s glass house.
(Photo: James Welling)

Give us your fraying pink sheets, your yellowing boxes of grass, your mid-century chairs yearning to go to Goodwill already. It’s time to talk about what’s next. Though we’re keenly aware of the pitfalls of style predictions, for this issue we set out to explore the many directions in which design in New York is going. Some were dead ends; others were going in circles. But we found plenty of treasures too: the spectacular interiors of the Jean Nouvel building in Soho, a trove of early-eighties design decadent enough to make you want to rent Dynasty’s first season, and a rental apartment full of eye-popping color and the highest design that the Benelux countries have made. We surveyed the product realm and pinpointed eleven bellwether design-world talents. Finally, we photographed the Glass House, pushing 50 and still ahead of the pack. Some ideas you’ll love immediately. Others—wait and see. Whether it’s a corner of your living room or just a corner of your mind, you’ll want to clear a bit of room for what’s ahead.

The Next White

Some new renters are perfectly satisfied with slapping a fresh coast of paint on the walls. One modern-furniture collector took things a lot further.

The Next Dakota

French starchitect Jean Nouvel’s 40 Mercer reimagines the quintessential New York apartment house downtown, with river views.

The Next Everything

Le Corb’s new colors, a cruelty-free animal head, a cutting-edge desk plant, and other products that are knocking on your door.

The Next Mid-Century

The good news: There’s a hot new period to collect. The bad news: It’s the eighties. The Next Monticello

After half a century as the most famous transparent private residence in the world, Philip Johnson’s Glass House is finally open to all.

The Next House & Garden

A bad mix is cliché or cacophony. Deborah Needleman, editor of high-low journal Domino, shows how it’s done with a muted hand.

The Next Garde

Whether their field is furniture, flowers, architecture, or art, these eleven people are building the edge, even as we speak.