PASSION and FIRE: Michael Taylor

Michael Taylor, personal residence, via Architectural Digest

Keeping the fires of passion burning- when I think of what this means, I often turn my thoughts to the late decorator, San Francisco's Michael Taylor …. his Sea Cliff house had a rustic, masculine, elegance not often seen. 

 

While MT is most often associated with the very glamorous, chic, "California Look" - a modernist pastiche of wicker, stone, and white Glant textures... he was also very much of a classicist and loved the world of fine art and antiques...here, you can see also how he would almost always incorporate the use of natural plants and trees into his décor- and he was a fore runner of the taste for the high and the low, mixing inexpensive wicker pieces from Cost Plus with the finest French furniture with wild abandon!

 

Always "hands on" he once used cardboard packing boxes in a Manhattan apartment to create a mock-up of his furniture plan- in three dimensions-!  Needless to say, he landed the job.  Like all good decorators, many of his best clients became great friends- and when I connected with Pat Montandon, a former MT client, she shared with me the time they rode into Napa in a convertible while eating fried chicken!

 

Rose Tarlow, another dear friend of his, wrote a fabulous background and intro to the book on MT by my friend Stephen Salny- a very revealing portrait of a man who knew what he wanted and usually got it. When she showed him a house she had fallen in love with and bought, he told her to tear it down, and she did!  Read more about this here !

 

DF *****

 

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