He Italian style You can give you the touch you need. When the architect Morris Adjmi left New Orleans, his hometown, to make a career in New York, «he swore never returns,» he recalls. But life, as is usually the case, had other plans. In a visit to the exuberant Garden District of the city of Louisiana in 2016, Adjmi ran into a majestic cabin at the Center Hall, whose sales sign announced a real estate agent whom Adjmi had met in his childhood. He called her on the spot. «'Of course I remember you! «But he said he could be there in 20 minutes.»
A series of scattered reforms had left the house dismantled. Built in the 1840s, the house of Renaissance style Greek was adapted to an Italianic influence in the 1880s. Then it was reforming after Hurricane Katrina. Adjmi states that in the last reform «the original architecture was not taken into account. ADJMI and his wife, the architect and photographer Lisa Mahaha Elegant and modern Italian style.
«We tried to highlight the original architecture,» says Adjmi, and, given the legacy of extensions and reconfigurations of the house, had a lot of work. The Master Artesano of the plaster Janusz Urbanski was used, who took molds from the only original gypsum crown molding that remained in the entrance lobby to recreate moldings in the rest of the house. The house also had some intact chimneys, but a previous owner had replaced them with others of wood. Only one retained its original cast iron door. They did not find an adequate substitute, but Urbanski proposed a seemingly far -fetched solution: «He said: 'I can melt the whole chimney', and I exclaimed: 'What?»
For the living room, the dining room And the library, which are much larger stays, with ceilings 4.5 meters high, had said: «Let's look for one on the shelf,» says Adjmi. «Inspired by a photo of a similar house, the artisan prepared a 40 -piece design with acanthus leaves.» Then, Adjmi placed modern lamps – the cloud spider 37 of Apparatus in the living room; A spider Matter Made ark of three levels in the dining room – in front of the exquisite recreations.
Somewhere between the weather and the decline of New Orleans? «Says Adjmi, whose mentor and previous partner was the postmodern teacher and winning architect of the Pritzker Prize, Aldo Rossi. Rossi's influence is more evident in the dining Rossi was rather small; Italian style High level also came through the Mollino house, in Turin, where «the juxtaposition of textures and colors resonated» in Adjmi.
The reform of his now home of an exquisite Italian stylewhich lasted two years, says Adjmi, responsible for luxury buildings in New York and Washington DC, raided the way for the architect to do what years before would have seemed unthinkable: open an office in his hometown. «Things change,» Adji reflects on breaking his promise of decades of never returning. «It has been a good place to do both: play and work.»