Ward Bennett
and
a
goat.
I've always loved anything
by
Ward.
This just confirms my feelings.
Joe D'Urso
Joe is still around and doing great interiors.
This is as close to
indoor/outdoor
living as we
East Coasters will ever really get.
Juan Montoya
We see Juan all the time,
charming man.
I wonder what that box at the end of the bed is for?
Juan?
Who are these guys?
Tessa Kennedy and Michael Sumner
Never heard of them...
but would certainly like to!
Their interiors are great!
Love this.
Maybe it's just the 20 foot ceilings....
Again,
who?
Why it's Robert Bray and Michael Schaible
Good work fellers.
Ditto.
I'm a little afraid to ask what happened to
a lot of these guys.
It has been 30 years,
and it was the 80s....
Sir John Dickinson
This interior is so calm and nice.
Carla Venosta
?
Not bad.
Too bad for the unfortunate view.
Tuscany is so ugly that time of year....
Nice lamps though.
Jay Steffy
Get ready....
Jay!
Who da thunk it of you?
All I have to say is WoW!
Gae Aulenti
So you thought all she did was famous lamps?
Wrong.
This is my personal favorite.
I'm putting moving into a 14th century
Italian monastery on my list of things
to do after seeing this shot.
Eric "Mr. Cardigan" Jacobson
Good job Eric.
What is that polka dot painting?
Antony Redmile
Scary....
Even scarier...
but I like it....
(Thanks to Erica Brown for her book "Interior View - Design at Its Best".)
No Jay Spectre?? I'm hurt. Thoughts: Antony Redmile giving you serious Anton Lavey; Ward Bennett is too beautiful for this world; young Joe D'Urso: TOTAL BABE.
ReplyDeleteI worked for Jay Steffy in the ’70s. Thanks for posting the shot of the Del Amo apartment in Madrid—arguably among the most fabulous spaces of all time. There was, and still is, no one like him.
ReplyDeleteMax King
Whatever happened to Jay Steffy?
ReplyDeleteI think you should ask Max from above....
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure. He was below the radar for a while. He shot all those great covers and features for AD—in available light, mostly, which many people didn't get, but they were beautiful. Years ago, Mimi London told me that he sometimes showed up at her house during a full moon. I was at an auction in California a few years ago and noticed some lots were "From the estate of Jay Steffy", but I've not seen an obituary anywhere.
ReplyDeleteI got my job with him in 1970 (I'd seen his work in the old LA Times HOME section) by calling one Friday afternoon and telling him I thought I should be working for him. His response was, "Can you come Monday?"
I could and I did. My very first day on the job was taken up with picking fabric to make a sleeve for the chandelier in Candice Bergen's bedroom. There was never a dull moment with Jay. There was no one like him.
I recently posted this in my blog, and wanted to share it here, since it was this blog page that inspired it:
ReplyDeleteJay Steffy was hired by my father to "decorate" our family home (2101 La Mesa Drive, Santa Monica, CA.) in the early 1970's, when my sister and I were just toddlers. He did his job well, our house was featured in every home decor magazine they had back then, House Beautiful, Better Homes and Gardens, even the L.A. Times sent a photographer over to shoot something for their "Style" section. (To be honest, my memory of this is very vague, and possibly inaccurate.) In other words, he was no slouch at his job.
But, he was much more than just "the interior decorator"--to my sister and me, he was more like an uncle or a member of the family. (In fact, he was closer to us than either of our actual uncles, whom we barely knew and rarely saw.) He and I remained close well into my adulthood; he even decorated my sister's and my first "home", (720 Shoemaker Lane, Del Mar CA.) the condo we purchased to live in while attending UCSD for college in the early 90's. He died shortly after finishing our condo, and I wasn't made aware of his passing until shortly after his funeral, which I (obviously) didn't attend. I truly miss him and mourn his loss to this day.
My earliest (and fondest) memory of Jay is as follows: One day he walked into the kitchen and found my sister and I hysterically crying because we didn't have one of the "required costume items" (yellow ballet slippers) we needed for our first major ballet recital taking place that evening. Without them, we would not be allowed on stage, we wouldn't get to perform our routines, routines we'd practiced three times a week, every week for months. Since our parents weren't home and had left us in the woefully inadequate care of our Guatemalan housekeeper, Hortensia, (who couldn't even say "yellow" well enough to be understood by anyone that might happen to sell ballet slippers), things looked pretty grim.
That is, until Jay walked in, and saved the day. He listened to us tearfully explain our untenable predicament, thought for a second and said, 'Well, I'm sorry, but you girls will NOT be missing your recital! Yellow ballet slippers? Is that all you need? Well, that's easy! You have your pink ballet slippers right!? I mean, you've got a few pairs of those, right?" We nodded in unison. "Okay, well, grab your oldest, most faded ballet slippers and bring them back here. Meanwhile, tell me where your coloring supplies are, where your colored pens and markers are. Okay?" We did as we were told, and when we came back to the kitchen, Jay had a bunch of yellow magic markers (mine smelled like lemons!) and we each started feverishly coloring our pink ballet slippers yellow. The happiness we felt when we saw how well his plan was working was tempered only with the fear that the ink would smear on our white tights and that other people might notice our "fake" yellow slippers. But, he sprayed something from under the kitchen sink (still don't know what it was) to "seal" the yellow marker and off we went to perform in our first big ballet recital and no one noticed anything at all amiss. Jay even came to the recital with Hortensia (our housekeeper) and cheered louder than our parents ever would have, had they been there...
Hi Esme
DeleteThanks for your post, now I know what became of Jay — those were things from his estate that I saw at action, apparently. I'd love to talk to you if you have time. maxkingmanhattan@gmail.com