Codependent by Design or Designer Codependent Is Manhattan-based interior designer Steven Gambrel the ultimate enabler? No, not the kind who covers an alcoholic’s last sip or latest slip; rather one who works in total environments, from crisp summer slip covers on English 19th-century armchairs, to much-brooded-upon paint colors and the strategic placement of a room’s electrical outlets, to a consideration of architecture, building site, and client taste and lifestyle. In the theater, Germans calls such broad vision coupled with detailed execution Gesamtkunstwerk,(ITALICS) or a synthesis of the arts. In real-world, real-life residential interiors, creatives of any nationality call such a muti-platformed project hard to pull off. Yet that is exactly the kind of obsessive, no-detail-too-small work in which Gambrel specializes. Naturally, he’s an architect by training. A Virginia native, Gambrel received his architecture degree in 1992 from what has been called Mr. Jefferson’s University, but which is perhaps more widely known as the University of Virginia, a campus of rolling hills, red brick, and plenty of columns founded by Thomas Jefferson, an ardent proselytizer of the Palladian, hence Vitruvian, hence classical, principles of architecture (the school, like nearby Monticello, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the only U.S. university to enjoy such a distinction, and it was also the first American university to allow specializations in such diverse fields as astronomy, botany, philosophy and, most topically for Gambrel, architecture). Is it any wonder, then, that he’s focused on process; that he approaches the term “life-style” empirically and objectively; that he favors books “about people whose lives revolve around a house, be it high, low, on the up or down swing;” that when traveling – in Europe, India, Asia, even in small towns on Eastern Long Island – he studies the natives going about their quotidian rituals? How they have their morning coffee, go about their shopping, or make a meal. “I’m interested in environments in action,” says Gambrel, who established S.R. Gambrel in 1995 in New York, “In building environments that people activate.” And, in turn, he’s interested in building environments that activate people – spaces that reflect, support, even enhance life-styles, a term he defines not as a Madison Avenue advertising hook, but as the way his clients live – actually live – in their homes. Such understanding does not come easily or immediately. Gambrel listens, watches and, as his client relationships ripen, detects and deduces needs that were not initially clear or even necessarily consciously expressed. “I love reading my clients, learning what is going to help them live fuller, work faster, realize a dream,” he says. “It’s about giving them the proper tools, the optimal setting.” As far as interiors, that has multiple translations. There’s a grand manor-style house in Bronxville, New York, a recent project with a traditional floor plan and series of formal rooms that his clients found they rarely used and which stifled the family’s groove. Or an elegant Southampton home with a beautiful but daunting dining room whose threshold was rarely crossed. Or, in his and partner Chris Connor’s own four-story, 1820’s West Village townhouse, a couple of small, left-over rooms resulting from a now-enclosed horse walk that once provided passage from the street to rear courtyard. Gambrel’s response was to reconceive. Too formal or detached becomes duo-purpose (a dining room now serving as, say, a more intimate eating area and library) or new purpose (“Why must the main room directly off the entryway must be the living room?”); and that awkward space finds new life, and great charm, as a guest bedroom, reading nook or wine cellar. “Especially in older houses, people too often forget that there are no inviolable rules about a room’s role, and that these spaces can be utilized in ways for which they were not originally intended,” says Gambrel, pointing out that clients, over time – and perhaps with a little help and gentle steering – come to understand the difference between interiors that are inspirational as opposed to aspirational. But while there might not be cut and dried rules, there are hard and fast principles. One is the importance of time and place in Gambrel’s designs. “I have one client who has four houses spread over the globe,” Gambrel explains. “Each one is completely different, reflecting the client’s taste but also the various locations – the climate and terrain and actual site – as well as how the family lives in each house, depending on its purpose and the overall pace of life while there.” Hence, while Gambrel’s own weekend house in Sag Harbor has every modern convenience (including marble floors in the kitchen salvaged from the Museum of Modern Art during its 2004 renovation), its core still references the 1790’s “half-house” that it originally was, and the property is still in perfect sync with its neighborhood of 18th-century half houses. The same also applies to new construction, such as a project in Southampton that Gambrel designed to look as though it had “organically evolved over decades, with its origins perhaps in the 1920s.” Not so much a layering as a palimpsest, where different ages and epochs show through to the present, creating a result that is traditional and modern at the same time. Gambrel’s aesthetic also embodies and embraces this paradox, as does his conception of house and home, where there is a melding of Shakespeare’s conceit that All the World Is a Stage, and hence residential interiors stages sets, alongside le Cobusier’s fiat that The House Is a Machine For Living. The shock of the new is thus made beautifully familiar.