Who else but someone who recognizes the past as a palpable influence could do justice to it in the elegant, creative, uncluttered, but definitely not austere, way that Saladino does? “I think mostly it’s my historical love,” he says, when you reach him at home in Santa Barbara, of what informs his work. “My love of the past—and the past for me is not the past, it’s so vibrant and alive. It’s a well I drink from every day.” Before the well, however, there were fountains—those of Kansas City, Missouri, a town that Saladino says “has more fountains than any city in the United States,” where he was born after his parents moved from Italy in 1923. Saladino graduated from Notre Dame, and went to the Yale School of Art and Architecture, but it was his two years (1965–1967) spent working in Italy for an architect born into one of Rome’s ancient families that left an indelible impression on the designer and his work, especially, he says, an “appreciation for corroded surfaces and monumental scale.” By 1972, at 29, he opened his own practice in New York City with $32,000 he and his late wife, Virginia, received from selling 5 acres of land they had bought for $7,000 on Block Island off the Connecticut coast. “It gave me enough money to sustain myself for a year if the phone didn’t ring,” he says. “But the phone did ring, and I started getting little jobs, and one thing led to another.” Those “little jobs” turned into major jobs coming now out of a 14,000-square-foot office. From country homes to city high-rises, Saladino continues to add to a dazzling portfolio spanning a 50-yearlong career. (His first-ever retrospective, guest-curated by Eric Brown of Eric Brown Design, opens at the Greenville County Museum of Art on September 12 through October 28, 2012, and Saladino is the keynote presenter at its 27th annual Museum Antiques Show). “But you know it was scary,” the icon of design openly admits, reflecting on that early leap into the unknown, his candor revealing a firm grasp on finer points of simplicity and humility. Example: His favorite dessert? Key lime pie. (“Oh, absolutely that would be my last meal.”) One of his favorite Southern expressions from his childhood in Kansas City? “Pigs get fat, and hogs get eaten.” Saladino’s use of color is another fingerprint of his style, and he recites the names of his favorite colors like lovers would the names of their beloved—each syllable rolled out in adoring, enunciated CTaylor 4thS TownSept12.indd affect. Periwinkle blue is a signature hue, though he is drawn to shades he says that “are actually elusive, that change from morning to night so when you look at it, you say, ‘Is that celadon, or is that grey? Is that beige, or is that mauve?’” He likes to let the senses do their job—allowing the color, uncluttered wall space, and rustic and polished counterpoints to create a sense of exploration. His own started at age four when he first began drawing houses on the prescription pads his doctor father brought home at night. “And by eight, when I was a Cub Scout,” says Saladino, “we had to do scrapbooks, which you made out of plywood and lashed together with rawhide. All the boys in my den were collecting their favorite cars and sports figures, and I was collecting pictures of the great houses of Europe, which I put in there. That was shocking for the den mother, who called my mother, who said, ‘Oh yes, he’s a very unusual child.’ That was her polite way of saying difficult.” For the difficult kind, however, there is an ease in knowing that life can be a work of art. You just have to design it that way.
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Photographs courtesy of John Saladino
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Interior Perspective: (clockwise from top-right) John Saladino’s three-legged coffee table with a steel top; Saladino; paintings by Saladino, along with his iconic Harley Chair, that will be on view at the Greenville Museum of Art’s retrospective of his work September 12 through October 28, 2012; a bedroom in Saladino’s home that demonstrates his masterful use of color
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