Diamond Baratta Design

Designers We Love

 William Diamond and Anthony Baratta

Website 

Diamond Baratta Design

Quotable Quote

 All the design rules we had 20 years ago are important; it's like learning the classics. But those design rules, basically, all have to get thrown in the garbage or you're not growing. You keep them, and you have to integrate them, but you have to expand, too. You have to keep reinventing.

Background 

Bill Diamond originally partnered with Pauline Feldman, a continuing mentor to the Diamond Baratta Design practice. Tony Baratta joined Diamond as an apprentice in 1974, introduced by a mutual friend. First six months were rocky. No money for Tony, just the learning experience. 26 years later, they are a dynamic duo, much in demand and widely published in every high-end shelter magazine.

Design inspirations include Sister Parrish ("a genius"), Zha Hadid ("a genius"), David Hicks, Richard Rogers, Joe D'Urso ("the greatest designer of the 70s, bar none"), Gio Ponti ("we're totally obsessed with him right now"), and art from painters and sculptors ("our biggest inspiration right now; we look to art for color and pattern").

Their Caryn and Craig Efron house project in Manhattan was a location shoot for the Meryl Streep character (Miranda Priestly) in the movie Devil Wears Prada.

Playful experimentation with scale, like the Diamond-Baratta sofa ("It looks like you took a bicycle pump and blew it up! It took scale to new levels.").

Everything they design is custom, from the furniture, fabrics, rugs, and hardware. Diamond Baratta Design has expanded into licensed merchandise. Lee Jofa fabric line. Stark floor covering line. Old World Weavers wallpaper line.

What We Love 

 This design couple have often been called "geniuses," but there is some bitchy animosity in some of the design blogs who find their experimentation with color and pattern to be too cold, too bright, too carnivalish, too wild, too designed, or too sterile. We don't concur. Our descriptions of their work would be bright, bold, and fearless.

Give us a Diamond Baratta handmade needlepoint rug, their signature design element, any day!

We appreciate their layers of color, pattern, and shape. Many of their spaces make us smile. Some make us laugh. We know they are achieving the right balance for their clients' personalities because they tend to attract strong personalities -- like those who asked them to do 18th Century French design after passing up the chance to work with designers who specialized in that. We're sure they got French with a huge playful twist.

There is a modern edge to the project Diamond Baratta Design complete, but there's also an undertow of retro and a huge dollop of arts and crafts. We like the handmade aspects of many of their rooms, from braided rugs to nubby chair fabrics.

In a recent interview, Bill Diamond advised homeowners to decorate by being true to yourself. Tony Baratta added, "Stay away from being trendy," to which Mr. Diamond added, "If you do trendy, in two years you're going to hate it if you're doing it because you think it's what you should be doing. But if you're doing it because it's who you are, what you really love, you're going to love it forever."

Diamond Baratta Sampler

 

 

Photo Credits: House & Garden, Design to Inspire.

Rose Tarlow

Designer We Love

 Rose Tarlow

Website

Rose Tarlow - Melrose House

Quotable Quote 

I like minimalism, but not if it's too studied. I don't like anything that looks studied. I don't say you can't study - just don't let it look that way.

Background 

Born in Shanghai. Family moved to NYC while she was still in infancy. Raised in New Jersey. Father, much admired by Rose, died when she was 15. Love of beauty. Studied at Emerson College Boston, New York School of Interior Design, Parsons. Married and moved in her 20s with now ex-husband to California. Opened up an LA antique store in 1975. Eight years later, designed and manufactured her own furniture. Much sought-after interior designer. Self-taught architect. Made her mark with designing antique furniture that emulates great antiques. 1997 introduced her first line of signature fabrics for Scalamandre.

Perfectionist. Likes everything beautiful to come home to. Candlelight dinners. Cites astrology as a big influence to her, but is not slavish to the stars when it comes to her life or the work she does for her clients. Special attention to details, authenticity, functionality, and PROPORTION (her design golden rule). Home in Bel-Air, a flat in London where she has taken courses at the Victoria and Albert, and a property in Provence (it seems every article we research about her lists a new property, so this is probably either inaccurate now or woefully incomplete).

Celebrity homes she's decorated include Barbara Walters, David Geffen, Eli Broad, Charles Gwathmey, Richard Meier. Rose Tarlow -- Melrose House has two core locations in Los Angeles on Melrose Place. 14 satellite locations around the U.S. sell her beautiful wares. Designs furniture that is 100% manufactured in LA under her watchful eye for perfect detail. Her fabrics are made all over the world. Her line includes prints, lamps, linens, cashmere bed throws, wallpaper, place settings, accessories. Her scented candles benefit a breast cancer cause at the UCLA Medical Center, and when she has time, she teaches at UCLA School of Interior Design.

What We Love 

This designer's taste is impeccable. She has it 100% correct when she places less emphasis on the scale of elements in a room and instead emphasizes the proportion of all pieces working together.

We like the story she tells about a handpainted wallpaper she had commissioned to look like an 18th Century Chinese wallcovering. She wanted the texture of the paper to feel old, so she balanced on a stepladder and rubbed sandpaper and fine steel wool over the surface to achieve the right softness, to emulate the old.

"A room must be comfortable to look comfortable," she says, and we applaud her preference for interiors that don't look "too decorated."

She rarely takes on interior design projects. The rare ones she does accept must be FUN. Shouldn't every designer use Rose Tarlow's acid test for taking on new work? (And what does she love more than anything? Buying antiques. It's a magnificent obsession.)

Her rusticity can make something new feel filled with age and appearing like something out of the quirky pages of World of Interiors. She likes "eccentricity" in her design, and that keep it from being boring. Her interiors, the rare ones she does, are anything but bores. They always have a twist.

In her furniture line, she makes most pieces to appear like great antiques . . . or she incorporates parts of antiques she loves, like an outstanding chair leg. Her crackle finishes, use of rich hardwoods, and lack of over-distressing new furniture to look like old (one of our pet peeves) make her furniture line wonderful.

All design should be like Rose Tarlow's - functional, useful, beautifully proportioned, and completely available. She believes that you should love everything about where you live. Your home is a refuge from the world, and it should be the most special, beautiful retreat you can create. Amen.

Rose Tarlow Sampler

 

 

 

Photo Credits: Robb Report Luxury Home, Decorati.com, ThisNext.com, Rose Tarlow