Designer Jonathan Adler and his partner, Barneys creative director Simon Doonan, covered the living room at their Shelter Island, N.Y., home in color.
SHELTER ISLAND, N.Y. – Walking into Simon Doonan and Jonathan Adler’s weekend house is like walking into a Jonathan Adler store.
There are the graphic Jonathan Adler throw pillows the home goods designer is known for. The geometric Jonathan Adler bedsheets in chocolate and blue. The Jonathan Adler sofa the color of their Norwich terrier, Liberace (wheat). And, of course, enough of Jonathan Adler’s first crafty fetish, pottery, to stock three houses, or so it seems.
“We are a fully branded home,” says Doonan, 55, the “Top Design” judge’s partner of 13 years and a fixture at Barneys for 22 years (he’s the department store chain’s famously droll creative director).
“I find it very questionable when people design stuff and they don’t have it at home,” Doonan says. “If Jonny makes it, we should have it.” Likewise, if Simon writes it, they display it: Galleys of Doonan’s fourth book, “Eccentric Glamour: Creating an Insanely More Fabulous You” (Simon & Schuster, April, $24), are available for browsing.
Fie, then, on faux humility: “We’re both sort of dorky enthusiasts of what we do,” says Adler, 41, sipping tea from one of his Utopia mugs. “And I think we should be.”
Hence most of the couple’s three-bedroom, 1,800-square-foot beach cottage, a short ferry ride north of the Hamptons, pops with Adler’s designs, which are aptly suited to the airy, angular space. Built in 1972, the wooden house was “a rat hole,” as Doonan puts it, when he and Adler bought it a decade ago. Gray and grim, “it looked like someone had been murdered.”
So the couple combined their creative credos – Doonan’s window-dresser wit with Adler’s it’s-a-mod-mod-mod-world whimsy – to breathe life into decay. Outside, they wreathed the house in decking (the slab by the garage turns into a ping-pong arena during the warmer months). They dug out an “epic” (Adler’s term) 75-foot lap pool, and they planted Himalayan banana plants and bamboo throughout the property, which measures one-third of an acre.
They coated the walls, ceiling and floors in glossy white marine deck paint and then “layered on copious amounts of color,” from the color-block rug to the carrot couch. Their muse? Sunset magazine circa 1970, a valentine to rustic California chic.
“I wanted a house that looked like the era it was built in,” Adler says. “I love all types of architecture as long as they’re authentic.”
The goal was to evoke the fun, “ping-y optimism” of the late ’60s/early ’70s – to re-create “the original gestalt of the Hamptons: a weekend utopia of little getaways.”
The peace, of course, is never more palpable than during what Adler calls the “mellow and nesty” winter season, when his palette really pulsates against the backdrop of barren trees and bleak skies.
Mixed in among Adler’s wares are sculptures by his lawyer father, vintage mid-century furniture, flea-market finds, thrift-store scores and “priceless antiquities,” Adler says. “But enough about Simon.” (Ba-dum-ching.)
“There’s a lot of sarcasm in this house,” Doonan says. And camp. They’ve transformed the upstairs loft into something akin to “Rhoda’s apartment,” Adler says, referring, naturally, to Rhoda Morgenstern’s attic studio on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” “You walk up (here) and it’s sort of a surprise, a nod to psychedelic Victoriana.”
A beaded curtain imprinted with a swirly pattern hangs by the bed. Oversized antique keys are nailed to the wall, and the floor is painted fuchsia. Fusty pieces get a funky makeover, such as the vintage hutch and campaign desk splashed in bright purple.
Adler used to sculpt his ideas into art right here, in the former garage-cum-studio. “I had this idea that it would be relaxing to come out and make pots,” he says. These days, it’s just a garage.
“I don’t think Marc Jacobs is sewing dresses on the weekend,” Doonan deadpans.
There are some elements of the job you don’t want to bring home.
Decorations in the home include pottery designed by Jonathan Adler.
Liberace, the dog owned by Jonathan Adler and Simon Doonan, finds that a guest bed can be very comfortable.