June 21, 2015Interior designer Benjamin Vandiver is fond of a quote from the decorating legend Albert Hadley: “Design is coming to grips with one’s real lifestyle, one’s real place in the world. Rooms should not be put together for show but to nourish one’s well-being.”
In some ways it’s hard to think of Vandiver, a paragon of hip interiors, as a visual descendent of the late Hadley, known for the eclectic formality of his Upper East Side spaces, and even harder to imagine Vandiver’s number-one favorite adjective, “aggressive,” coming out of Hadley’s mouth.
Indeed, “aggressive” is the word Vandiver uses for a palm-frond wallpaper he chose for one project in Nashville, and he goes on to note that he knew he would stand out among decorators there because “there was no one here who was being really aggressive.”
After chatting with Vandiver in New York, it’s clear that what he really means when he uses the descriptor is what other decorators refer to when they talk about something with pop, contrast or excitement.
In a breakfast room he completed for a young family for a different Nashville project, he used restrained reproduction Josef Hoffmann dining chairs but also created a custom peacock-blue banquette for impact, hanging an Apparatus light fixture above it that resembles an upside-down clutch of inflated balloons.
Overall, Vandiver’s aesthetic is actually fairly relaxed and modern, with interesting textures applied liberally and usually an element of surprise in every room. “I like comfortable luxury,” he says. “Nice things, but not too many of them.”
When it comes to his rapid rise in the decorating ranks, “aggressive” fits Vandiver’s personality to a T. He founded his firm, Benjamin Vandiver Interiors + Lifestyle, in 2012, and his trajectory has been swift and upward. He was named One to Watch by Architectural Digest in 2015 and has done projects in Nashville, New York and Los Angeles.
Benjamin Vandiver’s Designer Beginnings
Born in Kentucky and raised in Northern California, where he also attended art school, Vandiver later ended up in Nashville, he says, because he liked the feel of the city — and he sensed an opportunity to distinguish himself from what he describes as some of the “stuffy” designers who had been ruling the roost there for decades.
“I like comfortable luxury. Nice things, but not too many of them.”
“There’s a palpable creative energy in the city, and it has an edge,” he says of Nashville’s famous music and arts scene. “But I think the easiest way to describe Nashville is that there are people who truly want others to succeed. I opened the business, and we were immediately very successful. Nashville really just said, ‘Yes, you can do it.’”
The actress Hayden Panetierre, of the TV show Nashville, and her then partner, heavyweight boxing champion Wladimir Klitschko, were among the people who immediately lent support, after meeting the designer through friends. They hired Vandiver to take a brand-new house and furnish it from scratch while they were traveling. The Nashville home is a more traditional spin on Vandiver’s usual look but still shot through with color. “We run a full, turnkey service for clients like that,” he says. “They can walk in and fall into bed and not have to worry about anything.”
Benjamin Vandiver Designs a Home for Nathan Followill
When he is not traveling between Paris and Los Angeles to source vintage pieces, or trying to make a 1990s-style New York apartment in the historic Police Building look “less like Monica Geller’s apartment from Friends,” Vandiver tackles large-scale projects like the expansion, renovation and interior makeover that he did for the Nashville home of Kings of Leon singer and musician Nathan Followill and his wife, singer Jessie Baylin.
The first step on that project was transforming a small, low-slung 1970s dwelling by the locally well-known modernist architect Robert Anderson into a 9,000-square-foot showplace. Under Vandiver’s direction, a local architect doubled it in size, adding a separate, similarly shaped volume and then connecting the two parts with an outdoor catwalk and a shared cladding of cedar shingles.
His interior scheme relies on lots of warm woods, too, forming part of the overall neutral palette. “Everything is either rift-cut oak or walnut,” says Vandiver, referring both to the floors and the cabinetry. Grasscloth wall coverings and mohair accents throughout different rooms give rich texture.
Bathrooms aren’t often the most revealing spaces to discern a designer’s taste, but those of the Followill-Baylin house say a lot about Vandiver’s fresh approach. That aggressive pop comes from the aforementioned palm frond wallpaper in one powder room; another one received a graphic, black-and-white Kelly Wearstler–designed wall covering for a little extra punch.
The his-and-hers sinks in the master bathroom face not a wall of mirrors, but a wall of windows that look out over the stunning greenery of the property — it reads more as a kitchen-sink setup than that of a bathroom. “I think people have enough mirrors,” says Vandiver, who did put one on the wall opposite the sinks, leaning against a ledge, just in case.
One of the prime sitting areas is what the couple calls the atrium, a glassed-in volume that connects the old and new areas of the house and includes a staircase with floating steps that is surrounded by walnut paneling.
Vandiver says the minimalist look was inspired by tastemaker Tom Ford’s movie A Single Man. Barrel chairs by Donghia and a new Ralph Pucci sofa are clustered around an early 1970s vintage table by Vladimir Kagan. On the wall hangs an eye-popping artwork: a nine-foot-wide photograph of a boombox by the New York artist Lyle Owerko.
“For a musician, it works,” says Vandiver.
Benjamin Vandiver’s Vintage Tastes
Vandiver prefers to source vintage pieces if he can — at least a third of the items in each room, he says — like the chaise in the Followill-Baylin office/sitting room that he found in Nashville and re-covered in chenille. He combines these with new pieces, like the Jonathan Adler walnut-and-brass screen that sits right behind it.
His penchant for vintage items surfaced in his own Nashville office, a striking black-and-white retreat. (As always, the spaces a designer comes up with for himself are revealing.) Vandiver may joke that “my office is usually the leftovers,” but he clearly knows how to make a meal of them.
For it, he re-covered barrel chairs from the 1960s in a white cotton-velvet fabric, placing them next to an African drum table. He then delivered graphic punch aplenty with a black-and-white 1980s drawing, adding an inexpensive Venus de Milo–like torso sculpture that he happened to stumble upon.
That final detail perfectly demonstrates the interior designer’s individuality: It’s unexpected, but it fits right in.
The same could be said of the way Vandiver has carved out a stylish niche for himself in an otherwise crowded decorating landscape.
