July 25, 2012Designer Thomas Pheasant is soon to oversee the redesign of Blair House, the presidential guesthouse on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. Top: The formal dining room of a house in McLean, Virginia, is detailed with expertly articulated dentil crown moldings and columns. All photos courtesy of Thomas Pheasant
It’s a mercy, perhaps, that architect John Russell Pope died in 1937, for he was spared the criticism that attended the unveiling of his Jefferson Memorial four years later. Back then, modernism was reshaping attitudes about the meaning and function — not to mention the aesthetics — of public monuments, and when the public saw Pope’s design, the vitriol rushed in. People mocked “Jefferson’s muffin” as “a cadaver,” “a servile sham” and “decadent stylism.” Most ungenerously, the megalomaniacal Frank Lloyd Wright disparaged it as “a gangrene of sentimentality.”
Since then, Pope’s work has received much posthumous acclaim. But young Thomas Pheasant was oblivious to this complicated backstory as he waited with his second-grade class in the rotunda of another Pope building, the National Gallery, for their tour. “Looking up at this grand dome, with its classical detail and large columns, I was stunned,” Pheasant recalls. “I remember standing there silently, thinking, ‘I want to live here.’ I didn’t know it at the time, but it was my first emotional connection to a space.”
Since that revelatory experience, the Washington, D.C.–based designer has come to admire Pope more deeply, counting him among his muses. “He was highly criticized for his classical vision,” acknowledges Pheasant, “but I like those who stick with their own evolution rather than those who are swayed by popular trends.” As Pheasant sees it, Pope wasn’t simply mimicking Greco-Roman precedents: “He was trying to reshape the clichés of the past.”
The Washington, D.C.–based designer Pheasant admits to having a penchant for the classical — so long as it melds with the contemporary. Here, both styles converge in a living room of a McLean, Virginia, residence.
Pheasant’s affinities with Pope come as no surprise. Classicism is to the nation’s capital what mid-century modernism is to Palm Springs, and Pheasant is a classicist — and Washingtonian — through and through. Yet, his interpretations are fresh and elegant in the most contemporary of ways, and this has placed him in high demand among a younger generation of Beltway society who crave what he describes as “a cleaner view of traditional.”
But Pheasant’s influence spreads well beyond the capital and its environs. He has just designed his second collection of furniture for Baker; at 75 pieces, it is one of the largest introductions in the venerable company’s recent history. Later this year, he will open Thomas Pheasant Studio in Singapore, concentrating primarily on commercial and hospitality projects in Asia, a market into which he is intrepidly venturing. Singapore will also house Thomas Pheasant Tableau, a retail venue for unique and limited-edition furniture designs as well as various tabletop items currently under development with such prestigious firms as Christofle.
In August, Pheasant — a slender, youthful 57, whose long locks of graying hair are the only characteristic to betray his age — will oversee the installation of his redesign for Blair House, the official state guesthouse on Pennsylvania Avenue, which hasn’t received a makeover since the 1980s. (The last decorators to undertake the project were Mark Hampton and Mario Buatta.) “I’m respecting the tradition of the building,” he assures. “I’m not going to paint the walls of the library in lime lacquer. But I’m bringing a tailored approach to detailing and infusing a modern spirit into the traditional character.” That entails, he explains, “simplifying the amount of pattern and using contemporary woven fabrics.”
He is also at work on his first book, Simply Serene, scheduled for publication from Rizzoli in the fall of 2013. “It is really more about my point of view and my process than it is a portfolio of projects,” he explains. A portfolio, in fact, would almost seem like hubris coming from this soft-spoken, understated and effortlessly polite designer.
The family room of a home he designed for clients in Washington is defined by stained-birch walls, door frames, a fireplace surround and a dramatic coffered ceiling.
Pheasant’s point of view coalesced, apparently, of its own volition. “I was born in D.C., but my parents moved to the suburbs — Adelphi, Maryland — when I was a baby,” he says. “I grew up in a ’60s split-level in a neighborhood where mothers did their own decorating.” Translation? A childhood environment tricked out with green-and-blue shag carpeting, a green sectional and a pole lamp (“very mod for the time”).
His National Gallery epiphany notwithstanding, Pheasant’s inclinations began asserting themselves in earnest around the fourth grade. “One weekend, left to my own devices,” he continues, “I pulled the blue carpet up in my room and bought black dye to try and dye my gold chenille bedspread. I cut the legs off my dresser to make it look more like campaign furniture, and I created a mobile of album covers above my bed.” His mother’s response: “I hope you like it,” she sighed, “because we’re not buying you new furniture.”
He studied architecture and design at the University of Maryland, taking interior- and furniture-design classes that would eventually determine his path. At 21, while still in college, he began working with Victor Shargai & Associates. “We didn’t have the same point of view,” Pheasant says diplomatically. The pocket-hankie-wearing Shargai represented what one could safely call “Washington establishment decor” — elaborate oriental carpets and wallpapers, floors of parquet and inlaid marble, ornate ironwork, lots of mint green. But, Pheasant explains, “He was a great person and businessman, and it was a wonderful foundation for starting out on my own,” which he did when one of Shargai’s clients approached him to do a project. “It wasn’t appropriate to take a private client,” demurs Pheasant, “but a friend said to me, ‘You can always get an assistant job. What do you have to lose?’ So I took the client on and started my own business.” He was just 24.
The entry hall of Pheasant’s Paris apartment contains pieces from his Studio Collection, including a black-lacquered chest with a Greek-key motif and an Art Moderne–inspired chair.
Pheasant’s aesthetic is so rooted in time-tested principles and so eminently adaptable that it renders the terms “traditional” and “modern” largely irrelevant. One is tempted to speak more in terms of the emotions his rooms elicit than the periods they reference. “Classical order is built on ideas of symmetry and organization and balance,” he notes. “If you can create a space that conveys those elements, it feels good. A sense of serenity is not confined to modern or traditional spaces.”
And, he insists, “While I do connect to classical elements, I have always been interested in evolving these ideas. Inspiration is not repetition — it is not simply recreating something you have seen. It is about taking something you have experienced and allowing it to filter through your own unique sensibility, so that when it comes out, it comes out new.” This credo clearly manifests itself in his furniture designs for Baker. In the latest collection, the signature Athens lounge looks like some Apollonian ideal of a chair — harmonious, disciplined, well-balanced — channeled through the minimalist ergonomics of Scandinavian modernism.
This fresh take on classicism is similarly expressed in his interiors. At the Parisian Left Bank retreat he shares with his partner of 27 years, Juan Carlos Rincones, a former dancer, the architectural envelope is undeniably classical: recessed paneling, pilasters, crown moldings, carved garland details. So are some of the Pheasant-selected furnishings and accents, such as an ebonized chest of drawers sporting a Greek key motif, an urn atop a bureau and a tufted settee of his own design. However, they keep company with a scroll coffee table à la Jean-Michel Frank, a modern room screen of ribbed translucent glass and black lacquer and chairs whose backs appear laced like a corset, evoking the famous Horst P. Horst photo taken in Paris of the Mainbocher corset on the eve of World War II — cultures and historic periods gorgeously blurred to chic effect.
More than classicism then, it’s an openness to evolution that is Pheasant’s guiding principle. Dividing his time between a D.C. home and the Paris pied-à-terre, his life is rich with new material that constantly tweaks and refines his aesthetic. So while Pheasant may live just 10 miles from where he grew up (in that shag carpet-covered house in Adelphi), in every other regard, he is universes away. And unlike Pope, thankfully, he has no detractors — although it’s easy to believe that if crotchety old Mr. Wright were alive today, he’d get his dander up about Pheasant, too.
