For an edition of Sotheby’s own magazine Reside, I wrote a short piece on a new Phaidon book release on modern houses by luxury fashion-retail architect Peter Marino. From the June 2024 issue:

The art of habitation

With a clientele roster that reads like an A to Z of luxury fashion houses—think Armani, Bulgari, and Chanel, to name just a few—New York-based architect Peter Marino is arguably the most sought-after designer for creating high-end retail environments. His residential designs, however, are equally jaw-dropping to behold, with individualistic and site-specific projects now revealed in a new book, Peter Marino: Ten Modern Houses (Phaidon).

To call him just a Modernist is a misnomer, as his style is really an amalgam of modern, material-led, art-focused, artisanal, and contextual. Who else can deftly craft a grand stone, wood, and bronze staircase to go with an abstract stainless- steel sculpture by Tony Cragg and hand-embroidered chairs in one residence — and then comfortably combine Takashi Murakami art with ancient phulkari textiles and vintage 1960s furniture in another?

For a home in Florida, he approached a client with a museum-quality art collection—including works by the likes of Alexander Calder, Robert Rauschenberg, and Joan Miró—with a pair of linked Modernist, jewelry box-like volumes whose light limestone walls form the perfect neutral backdrop to the artworks. Beyond considering the contents of a house, Marino always engages with the surrounding landscape—here being a narrow waterside site on a private island in Biscayne Bay. He devised an entrance foyer with a completely glazed bay-facing back wall, to ensure that the water is the first thing people see upon entering the home.

The interconnected living and dining room treats visitors to views of the art collection and, through a double-height glass wall, of the bay once again. While the public areas harbor most of the artwork, the private zones offer up their own Marino brand of eye candy in the form of material exploration influenced by the locale’s tropical climate. In the master bath, for example, an exotic pattern of sliced green onyx at once conjures both a lush forest and an undersea coral reef.

Meanwhile, on a hillside in the south of France overlooking the Côte d’Azur, Marino eschewed a boxy and angular architectural approach for one of wavy organic forms and whimsical retro-mod motifs. Curved bands of blond stucco spill out beyond stacked fieldstone and glass walls to delineate generous balconies, shady overhangs, and green-roof expanses that meld into a terraced garden landscape while affording unobstructed sea views.

“I have tried to faithfully follow the spirit of the places that I built upon,” he says of the 10 international projects featured in the book. All, he adds, express a “high degree of affection for the art of habitation.”

Reside (Sotheby's): Peter Marino, Ten Modern Houses