Within ten years, the Pressmans had signed him to mastermind all their stores, including major buildings in Manhattan and Beverly Hills. His first commission was a rectangular vitrine for LiLac Chocolates. Once on his own, Marino was drafted by Phyllis and Fred Pressman, the owners of Barneys New York, to help design store displays. This is a great leap from his early commercial training with George Nelson. Now the sum they spend on stores can easily top $100 million, if we’re building a tower.” “I remember in the ’80s we got our first commercial job for a million-dollar renovation,” Marino tells me. At least half of these projects are in China. The numbers are staggering: worldwide more than 30 stores for Chanel, 20 for Louis Vuitton, 15 for Dior. This sector now represents 50 percent of his practice (residential is 25 percent hotel, spa, and other commercial work make up the rest). There are names Marino is very comfortable throwing around, however, and those are the fashion brands for which he designs retail stores. When I ask him for a list of some recent private clients, he will only relinquish last names: Armani, Arnault, Coleman, Hill, Rayner, Rothschild, Safra, Schwarzman. “I’m with some of these families working on their sixth and seventh homes,” he says. But the right people see the right homes, I suppose.”Īt the level he works today, he says, “I feel like the family doctor.” Certain clients have been returning to his office (now 140 people strong) for three decades. “It’s been amazing to me,” he adds, “considering that my best work has never been published, that I got as far as I did. My projects have gotten much more complex, so it’s sort of like you have to grow up, which is something I think is dumb. As you get older you think more, which is a negative. It just comes unfiltered out of your stomach, your heart, anything but your mind. “There’s nothing like the energy and the creative flow when you’re young. “No-they were so f-ing gorgeous,” he says. I ask Marino if, in hindsight, he would do things differently today. In Marino’s words, “That was us sort of telling those Frenchies, ‘You want to be chic? Why don’t you do early-American Renaissance Revival?’ Which till that point everyone thought was so mingy.”)įew architects or designers can look back at such important early-career jobs. (The decor was an homage to Olana, the Hudson River Valley house of painter Frederic Church, with elaborate Orientalist gold-and-turquoise stenciling on the walls. The artist’s boyfriend, interior designer Jed Johnson, collaborated with Marino on some early projects, including the Saint Laurent–Bergé apartment at the Pierre hotel. The Warhol circle, encompassing not only the art world but also Euro aristocracy-at-large, gave him exposure to a cosmopolitan milieu that would otherwise have been inaccessible to a self-described “kid from Queens.” His entrée came through his then-girlfriend, Pat Hackett, who was Warhol’s secretary. Pei, George Nelson, and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill after getting his degree in architecture from Cornell, the effervescence of the downtown and jet-set scenes held a far greater appeal. Though Marino had apprenticed in the New York City offices of modern masters I.
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