Magni Modernism by James Magni - Abrams

of a Navajo rug, the carpet is a Turkish oushak from the 1930s. The live-edge coffee table, custom built by a local artisan, speaks to the cottonwood grove beyond the abundant glazing, and the handcrafted modernism of George Nakashima. Sofa pillows upholstered

in antique Japanese obis internationalize the design while reinforcing its simplicity (as does the Paul Mathieu daybed from Pucci).

“Everything you might find in a typical Jackson Hole log home is here,” Magni points out—yet reinterpreted with an elegance and sophistication that wouldn’t be out of place in Manhattan.

Elsewhere Magni found places to indulge the couple’s passion for midcentury furniture, Scandinavian in particular, which proved a good foil for the structure. “The house is very architectural, and midcentury tends to be more sculpted, but both are highly detailed in terms of how things connect,” he says. “It makes for a great combination—both the architecture and furniture pieces have a deeper intention.”

In the end, the clients’ insistence that one need not rely on style clichés to decoratively invoke the American West was spoton, and Magni proved an effective reinterpreter. Nowhere in the house is this more slyly evident than in, of all places, the master bath. “The tub is stainless steel, and everything is rectilinear planes of teak—floors, millwork, walls,” Magni says. “A local person might call it a hard contemporary look, but it’s our interpretation of a traditional cowboy’s washroom,” complete with a metal tub. As Dusenbury notes ironically, “It very deliberately relates to the vernacular the design review board was trying to protect.”

“It blends in here, but it could as easily blend in elsewhere,” Magni observes of the interior’s chameleon-like quality. This is, he takes pains to add, the very opposite of a generic design scheme— rather, a “classic” approach the merits of which are movable. “It’s always good when you can achieve that, because it’s hard to pull off,” he says. “It’s easy to reach for the cliché—especially in situations like this, where there’s pressure to produce a certain kind of design.”

Exterior view alicias doluptis et urent laborerro dita tur am idundit mo officid minum ressunt iistissum vent, il il ium quunt. Maxime la quatur rerum ipsa veritemqui aut ma qui rentotatium quatem dolo beatecatiae exerspernate nest moluptaquae voloria ditis re eos modipsu mendandanias dest, quo estiant iumquias resti temque velignatiae.

Opposite: alicias doluptis et urent laborerro dita tur am idundit mo officid minum ressunt iistissum vent, il il ium quunt. Maxime la quatur rerum ipsa veritemqui aut ma qui rentotatium quatem dolo beatecatiae exerspernate nest moluptaquae voloria ditis re eos modipsu mendandanias dest, quo estiant iumquias resti temque velignatiae.

42

Outdoor area alicias doluptis et urent laborerro dita tur am idundit mo officid minum ressunt iistissum vent, il il ium quunt. Maxime la quatur rerum ipsa veritemqui aut ma qui rentotatium quatem dolo beatecatiae exerspernate nest moluptaquae voloria ditis re eos modipsu mendandanias dest, quo estiant iumquias resti temque velignatiae.

Following pages: alicias doluptis et urent laborerro dita tur am idundit mo officid minum ressunt iistissum vent, il il ium quunt. Maxime la quatur rerum ipsa veritemqui aut ma qui rentotatium quatem dolo beatecatiae exerspernate nest moluptaquae voloria ditis re eos modipsu mendandanias dest, quo estiant iumquias resti.

Caya alicias doluptis et urent laborerro dita tur am idundit mo officid minum ressunt iistissum vent, il il ium quunt. Maxime la quatur rerum ipsa veritemqui aut ma qui rentotatium quatem dolo beatecatiae exerspernate nest moluptaquae voloria ditis re eos modipsu mendandanias dest, quo estiant iumquias resti temque velignatiae.

Opposite: alicias doluptis et urent laborerro dita tur am idundit mo officid minum ressunt iistissum vent, il il ium quunt. Maxime la quatur rerum ipsa veritemqui aut ma qui rentotatium quatem dolo beatecatiae exerspernate nest moluptaquae voloria ditis re eos modipsu mendandanias dest, quo estiant iumquias resti temque velignatiae.

177

menacing storm clouds above a rural landscape. And then there are the black dripping objects, by an Italian conceptual artist, on the grand piano. “When he came to Los Angeles, he was very taken with the La Brea Tar Pits,” says Magni. “Those are vintage silver candlesticks that he dipped in tar.”

In the dining room, conversely, the wife decreed that “‘there will be nothing but white,’” says Magni, and the snowy gleam of the space remains virtually unbroken. The long rows of Mies van der Rohe Brno chairs, on either side of a marble-and-steel table, give the room a hard-edged, slightly corporate feel—which is audaciously contravened by a painting, conceived and executed by Andy Moses, commissioned specifically for the space. Moses’ long artwork depicts one of the world’s largest deserts, rendered in iridescent acrylic paint; as the canvas is slightly convex, the “desert” appears to change color as the viewer moves along its length, shifting from white to silver, in much the same way as moonlight acts on a vast sea of sand.

Whereas his wife focused on effect, the husband paid attention to detailing, “which he wanted to be very refined, nicely finished, and well integrated,” Magni says, as with the inset leatherwork on the mahogany cabinetry in his office, and the tailored fit of the room’s ultrasuede walls. “We’d be rushing to get things finished, and he would slow us down,” the designer recalls.

“He’d say, ‘Be sure that it’s well done’—by which he meant, ‘Don’t sacrifice quality.’”

The husband proved also to be a great fan of relaxation and comfort, as is evident in the family room—his principal domain—

with its plush fabrics, live-edge coffee table, and five flat-screens (for watching multiple sporting events simultaneously). “Of everything in the house, he showed the most interest in the sofa for that room,” Magni observes. “We went back with him to the furniture showroom several times, to make absolutely sure he was comfortable sitting in it.”

If there remained one thing about which both parties were unequivocal, it was the comprehensive refinement, at every scale, of their home’s public spaces. “We took a curatorial approach,” Magni says, evident immediately—quite literally so—in the monumental foyer. The thirteen-foot-high, custom-designed chandelier, which Magni ultimately had crafted in Venice by one of the oldest of the Murano glassworks, went through multiple iterations—“we built models and hung them in the space, to detail the way it cascaded and how close it came to the stair,” he recalls, “then built a final mockup to make sure it played out properly as you walked up and down.” The designer selected a tiny pair of hand-cast, handpolished bronze chairs, by Paul Mathieu, for the foot of the grand stair, contrasting their sculptural delicacy with the space’s scale.

And in a counterintuitive, yet highly effective, gesture, he placed a pair of tall wooden totems, carved from old telephone poles by a Japanese artist, on the wall opposite the Mathieus.

“The high juxtaposition, in the pristine space, is very dramatic,” Magni says, adding, “It helps to remind us that everything is not perfect.”

42 Beverley alicias doluptis et urent laborerro dita tur am idundit mo officid minum ressunt iistissum vent, il il ium quunt. Maxime la quatur rerum ipsa veritemqui aut ma qui rentotatium quatem dolo beatecatiae exerspernate nest moluptaquae voloria ditis re eos modipsu mendandanias dest, quo estiant iumquias resti temque velignatiae.

180

Aspen alicias doluptis et urent laborerro dita tur am idundit mo officid minum ressunt iistissum vent, il il ium quunt. Maxime la quatur rerum ipsa veritemqui aut ma qui rentotatium quatem dolo beatecatiae. exerspernate nest moluptaquae voloria ditis re eos modipsu mendandanias dest, quo estiant iumquias resti temque velignatiae.