The affluent suburbs of Michigan, like so many in America between the wars, turned their backs on homegrown architecture in favour of old-world European swank. But as the Ford assembly lines boomed and the Modernist experiment took hold, houses of steel and glass began rising up amid the turrets and the towers, and it was in one of these that Jane Schulak grew up. The family decorator, Florence Barron, excelled at putting au courant Knoll furniture in conversation with choice art and antiques. She was a free-thinking collector herself: in 1963, she tasked Andy Warhol with making a self-portrait, his first, after backing out of a sitting with him. (‘Nobody knows me,’ she told him. ‘They want to see you.’ In 2011, Barron’s family sold her $1,600 commission at Christie’s for $38 million.)
After marrying, Schulak and her husband, Eddie, settled into their own half-timbered Xanadu. ‘The style wasn’t anything,’ Schulak says, adding that Eddie, a recent graduate in architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design, referred to it as ‘the ugliest fucking house you’ve ever seen’. Still, ‘it was a pretty neighbourhood. We didn’t know what we were doing. But it’s worked out.’
If Florence Barron gave Schulak her first whiff of high-style decorating, David Hicks got her stoned on the second. Lured by glossy magazine shots of his work, she sought him out on a trip to London. ‘I kind of made up a story that my mother was interested in hiring him, but he was so up for anything that he invited me to lunch in the country the next day,’ she remembers. This was the mid-1990s and Hicks had some time on his hands. He soon surfaced in Michigan and, after designing a few rooms for Schulak’s mother, he began crafting a rescue plan for her ugly house. He made her some furniture, then laid out a gated boxwood parterre and a rose garden; besotted, she travelled through Europe with him and spent a few days at his last great house, the Villa Verde in Portugal. Did he smell opportunity in the Midwest? Perhaps, but his timing was off. In 1998, several weeks before he died, Hicks returned to Michigan. ‘I said to him: “What am I going to do? I’m just at the beginning,”’ Schulak recalls. ‘And David said: “Well, it’s going to be horrible because there’s nobody as good as me. You could call Renzo, but – ugh, why start that? Or you could call Barbara Wirth and Christian Badin.”’
Cousins, contemporaries and both a whole generation younger than Hicks, Wirth and Badin were his trusted Paris associates, running his shop on the Rue de Tournon (Wirth) and collaborating on architecture and furniture projects (Badin). As solicitous as Hicks was arrogant, they were similarly well connected socially – Badin was Hubert de Givenchy’s first cousin and grandson of the Gobelins Manufactory director – and equally well versed in the recondite pleasures of formal decoration. One meeting and Schulak was hooked. From 2000 until their respective deaths in 2013 and 2019, she worked alongside Wirth and Badin as they transformed her house inch by inch, layering Hicks’s work in with theirs and, eventually, hers. ‘They were my teachers, they were my dear friends, they were my parents, almost,’ she says, her voice rising with emotion. ‘Often people hire a decorator and leave the house. I hired people and said: “You can’t get rid of me. You’ll have to shoot me first. I’ll never leave you guys.”’ On their semi-annual trips to Michigan, she would feed them from Eddie’s organic potager and sponge up their wisdom. When she went to France, they would scour the auction houses together and fan out into the workrooms of the artisans they’d enlisted, among them Thomas Boog, Philippe Anthonioz, Sylvie Saint-André Perrin and Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne. There were trips to London, Rome and Venice and endless country weekends; Schulak’s daughter Joanna took cooking lessons with Wirth’s chef, perfecting her chocolate soufflé in the draughty kitchen at Château de Brécy, the interior designer’s country home in Normandy.
Designing as a throuple was the least of the complications they overcame. While Schulak found a local carpenter, Mike Kolanowski, who could execute many of Badin’s plans, ornate pieces like the scagliola columns in the living room or a lacquered writing desk with silver mounts had to be made in Paris and shipped in. Artist Isabelle de Borchgrave could send her custom-printed wallpaper from Belgium, but decorative painter Dominique Bouillon had to work on site, and for weeks he camped out at the house to mastermind the singed-paper effect on the walls of a rocaille bathroom, or cloak the potting room, with its bamboo treillage in homage to Bunny Mellon, in clouds of vaporous green distemper.
Schulak loves pointing out all their individual contributions around the house. Wirth was fanatical about textiles, equally fond of making living-room slipcovers from raw artists’ canvases or striped silk from Antico Setificio Fiorentino. Badin’s gifts for classical French proportion permeate the octagonal dining room, where mock limestone-block walls were torn from craft paper and dyed a milky orange – very Hicksian, especially against orchid grout. Schulak feels Badin was overshadowed by his mentor and never quite given his due. But he muddled through, taking on projects with Mellon in Virginia, her good friend Jacqueline Kennedy in Washington DC and a palace or two in the Middle East. And then there was Michigan, which became something of a decosphere unto itself.
Over time, Schulak has broadened the primarily Gallic conversation by introducing contemporary furniture from, among others, Maarten Baas, Faye Toogood and Humberto and Fernando Campana, designers she often encountered through Culture Lab Detroit, the ambitious non-profit she founded to jump-start cultural renewal in neighbourhoods around that city. And she keeps on tinkering, loosening the compositional corsets in some rooms and introducing new frills in others. Any minute, a set of antique plates she recently spotted in Marrakesh will be going up on the kitchen walls.
Spend enough time here and you begin to think that the house might just contain, if not multitudes, then a little bit of everything. Schulak laughs at that. ‘I’m never finished,’ she says. And as far as she’s concerned, her imaginative friends are palpably still here. A bit like Florence Barron, who took pleasure in nudging a young Warhol onstage rather than hogging the limelight herself, Schulak prefers life behind the scenes. She’s certainly come away the richer.
A version of this article also appears in the May 2025 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers.
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