BROUGHT ELEGANCE TO FAMED HOMES
Thierry Despont, a worldly, erudite French architect and designer whose rich sense of history and heritage brought a refined elegance to the grand homes of industry titans such as Bill Gates and Calvin Klein, as well as to the restoration of landmark projects such as the Statue of Liberty, the Woolworth Building and the Ritz Paris, died Aug. 13 at his home in Southampton, New York. He was 75.
His death was confirmed in a statement provided by his family. No cause was specified.
A native of Limoges, France, Despont moved to New York in 1980 and quickly rose to a position of influence in the global architecture and design world. He was an officer of the Legion of Honor, the highest French honor, and was named to the Architectural Digest AD100 2023 Hall of Fame.
His low-key demeanor belied the grandeur of his monumental projects, which included restoring the Vendôme Column in Paris and refurbishing the Carlyle hotel, the Palm Court at the Plaza and the flagship Cartier store on Fifth Avenue in New York, as well as storied hotels in London, including Claridge’s, the Beaumont and the Dorchester. He also drew acclaim for his transformation of the Battery Maritime Building at the southern tip of Manhattan into the sumptuous private club Casa Cipriani.
But even in his most illustrious buildings, sheer opulence was not the point. “I like to create a small universe,” he said in a 2015 interview with Vanity Fair. “From
the master plan to the doorknobs, from the trees planted outside to the way people will sit and eat and dance inside, you create and control a whole microcosm.”
Given the scale of his grandest projects, “macrocosm” might be a better word. He designed Gates’ 66,000-square-foot lakefront house in Medina, Wash., known as Xanadu 2.0, and Klein’s 8.5-acre spread in East Hampton, N.Y., which sold for a reported $85 million two years ago.
Among his more publicized projects was his remodeling of the Herbert N. Straus House, a cavernous 30-room townhouse on East 71st Street in Manhattan, for retail billionaire Leslie Wexner.
“Thierry designs houses that are an homage to the client,” his friend Martha Stewart said in a 1999 interview with The New York Times Magazine. “He’s really designing for a king.”
As Despont put it in a 2016 talk at the French Institute Alliance Française in New York, “There has never,
never been a great house without first a great owner.”
For more than 30 years, he designed the interiors and exterior details for several homes belonging to his friends Millard S. Drexler, a retailing baron, and his wife, Peggy.
In a phone interview, Drexler praised Despont’s timeless sensibility, which he compared to his own taste in apparel. “Like with schmattas,” said Drexler, CEO of Alex Mill and formerly of the Gap and J. Crew, “you design things that feel special, unique and high-quality, but with a vision of never going out of style, that can be worn forever.”
The important thing for Despont, Drexler added, was creating a design that celebrated the unique history and character of a property. For the couple’s vineyard estate in St. Helena, California, Despont installed green and yellow glass windows to accentuate the golden California landscape and the leafy rows of vines.
For their 5.7-acre oceanfront compound in Montauk, N.Y., which formerly belonged to Andy Warhol, Despont created a rustic fishing-village charm using simple, sturdy antiques and homey touches such as vintage linen slipcovers. The Drexlers sold the compound for $50 million in 2015.
“The interiors he concocts for his immensely wealthy clients are a swirl of highly focused, carefully edited clutter,” architecture writer Karrie Jacobs wrote in the Los Angeles Times in 1996.
Despont’s own pad in New York’s Tribeca area was one that stood proudly among those of his wellheeled clients: a 10,000square-foot town house with plaid-print walls in the billiard room and art deco curves on custom alpaca sofas.
His affable personality and Old World charm placed Despont in high regard in New York society; he chafed, however, at being described as a “society decorator.”
A gentleman aesthete in the European tradition, he was an accomplished sculptor and watercolorist who displayed and sold his work in New York and Europe. He collected antique maps, stocked his bookshelves with leather-bound volumes of French history and literature, and expressed a particular appreciation for Romanian pianist Radu Lupu’s recital of Franz Schubert’s “Moments Musicaux.”
“With a slight patina of age — a dash of gray at the peak, a few laugh lines — he cuts an impressive silhouette in a black three-piece suit,” Julie V. Iovine wrote in a 1997 profile in The New York Times.