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Maurice Fatio, having found early fame in New York City designing town houses for society swells, followed the money and in 1923 branched out to Palm Beach, Florida. ‘I am living the most impossible life,’ the architect wrote shortly after his arrival, ‘trying to find the time to take care of my business while profiting from this marvellous climate to swim, play tennis and dance every evening until morning!’ In spite of these frantic diversions, Fatio went on to design 200 edifices in the tropical resort, ranging in style from Mediterranean Revival and French Normandy to Art Deco. Inevitably, commissions dwindled between the Great Crash and World War II, and those houses he did complete before he died in 1943 were far more modestly scaled than the majestic spreads conceived during his heyday.
Eighty years later, writer Simon Doonan and potter Jonathan Adler benefited from that reversal of fortune. Like Fatio before them, they achieved renown in New York – the former as creative director of Barneys and the latter as founder of a home-furnishings company – but felt magnetically drawn to Florida. Simon had been fascinated by the locale ever since he watched the 1960s children’s TV series Flipper as a boy in Reading, back in Britain. Jonathan, who grew up in New Jersey, recalls 24-hour train journeys with his grandparents to Miami, at the end of which he would awaken to find himself magically transported to a land of sunshine and swaying palms.
In 2002, they bought a holiday condo in Palm Beach, only to sell it 15 years later. Then, prompted by pandemic-induced second thoughts, they shed their Greenwich Village flat and purchased in its place a c1940 Fatio miniature masterpiece, a hop and a skip from the ocean. Again, like their architect, the former urbanites, though still working, immediately found themselves immersed in a far more frolicsome existence. ‘Every day is like summer camp,’ says Jonathan. ‘We bike, swim, run on the beach.’ Adds Simon: ‘I feel like Miss Marple, pedalling around the village. We gas up the car at most once a month.’
Because their landmarked British Colonial gem had recently been restored, they were free to concentrate their energies on decorating. ‘Simon needs his groovy, freaky glam-rock vibes,’ Jonathan explains. Simon replies: ‘Jonny’s major visual influences come from Reform Judaism synagogues.’ Only experienced tastemakers deeply adept at the art of the outré could pull off this peculiar T. Rex- meets-the-Torah aesthetic. They subtly balanced their motley vision with clarifying, restrained elements, such as the Levelor blinds hung on windows in place of curtains. ‘We wanted to keep things fresh,’ Simon says. These crisp counterpoints extend to the outdoors, where a rectilinear, Neutra-esque swimming pool beckons, its turquoise waters juxtaposed with lemon-yellow sunshades and cushions.
Today, Jonathan is standing in their compact kitchen, expertly rolling sugary dough between his palms into little spheres and lining them up on a pan to make snickerdoodles. ‘Jonny has been making things out of either clay or dough ever since he was a little boy,’ his husband says. ‘Because I am a pyromaniac,’ Jonathan answers, while simultaneously watching his phone ‘blow up’ with responses to the question put to his office: ‘What would you place in a dinky bowl?’ As the cinnamon-dusted sweets bake, the pair of them settle into Adler-brand sofas in the living room, painted a tonic shade of mint that Simon calls ‘Prada green, because I am permanently stuck in fashion mode’. He casts a meaningful glance at the can of Lacroix sparkling water he is holding. A traditional sunburst mirror presides over the diminutive Neoclassical fireplace, but upon closer inspection it becomes apparent that its spoked rays are constructed from ‘common-or-garden lumber’, in Simon’s words, and its convex reflective glass ‘is the ordinary kind they have in boutiques to catch shoplifters’. Instead of holding logs, the fireplace serves as a niche, displaying one of Adler’s brass biomorphic sculptures.
Simon and Jonathan felt that Fatio’s extreme architectural heterogeneity gave them licence to let loose. Even the gardens, with their overgrown plant beds offset by clean hardscape, defy easy stylistic categorisation. ‘How about Sissinghurst goes to Florida?’ Simon offers. No less mongrel is Foxy Lady, their rescue dog, whom he says is ‘part [model/actress] Suzy Parker and part Florence [of Florence and the Machine]’. When the couple’s backs are turned, Foxy polishes off the platter of warm snickerdoodles that Jonathan had just set beside his purple tabletop sculpture of a snail. The sole witness to the theft is the cyclopic Nicola L. eye lamp standing sentry in the corner. Self-described voyeurs and devotees of fringe exponents of Surrealism, they have made disembodied oculi an emblem of their house.
More eyes, these with lashes and brows, float watchfully on a needlepoint pillow placed on a Pierre Paulin mushroom chair in the Tiffany-blue dining room. ‘It is a faux dining room,’ Simon hastens to explain. ‘We use it only when we cannot eat outside. Normally it is stacked with books à la Karl Lagerfeld.’ The toadstool motif is picked up by beaded pillows on a camelback sofa and by four trippy fun-gal floor sculptures. Elsewhere there is a pillow emblazoned with the letters LSD, variegated acrylic sculptures of pills and a beadwork picture spelling out ‘poppers’ in bubble letters. ‘We are drawn to the iconography of drugs,’ Jonathan states, ‘even though we don’t partake. We prefer liberating our minds sans drug.’
For a house inhabited by a male two-some, there is also a surprising amount of female imagery, some of it anatomical in nature. Origin, a metal Miroslav Brozek bas-relief depicting a single breast emerging from a triangular aperture, adorns the eastern wall of the dining room. More breasts protrude from a pair of Jonathan’s Diana of Ephesus-like ‘Boob’ lamps. A Mel Ramos lithograph exhibits a nude dis- porting herself in a glass of orange Jell-O cubes. And Susan Anderson’s portraits of bedizened toddler beauty-pageant contestants hang above both Simon’s office desk and the loo in the main bathroom.
Perhaps the most lilliputian feature of what the duo call their ‘dollhouse’ is the arched steps to the second floor. Carpeted in stripes and colourfully illuminated by plastic Remo Saraceni wall clouds, it is a Pop stairway to heaven. ‘We are delighted and entertained by Palm Beach’s ethereal, hallucinatory, Technicolor vibrations, and its social folly,’ Jonathan notes. ‘If a house must have a sense of place, that is what we have here.’
For more about Jonathan Adler’s collections, visit uk.jonathanadler.com
A version of this article also appeared in the October 2024 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers. Sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter, and be the first to receive exclusive stories like this one, direct to your inbox
