Salt and Pepper: The Vogue for Black-and-White Interiors
Nothing here is by accident.
Light and shadow, presence and void, positive and negative.
Around North America, a handful of designers are steering the industry toward a new aesthetic: black and white. These proponents of the salt-and-pepper palette each have an individual style but are united by their strategic deployment of color (or lack thereof) to highlight art and architecture, make certain objects pop, or tie together the disparate elements of a high-altitude perch or multilevel brownstone. Meet a few of the leading designers of the unofficial League of Black and White.
Multilevel Brownstone
Taylor Hannah Architect Inc.
- A flight of floating stair treads, which levitate above the chessboard pattern of the black-and-white floor.
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Black and white is especially well suited to geometric patterns, as illustrated by this New York-style brownstone in Toronto, Canada, designed by Taylor Hannah Architect Inc. This 7000-square-foot dwelling features a flight of floating stair treads, which seem to levitate in the space and complement the ethereal feel of the space as a whole. Beneath the stairs is a chessboard of floor tiles, a black sculpture on a pedestal and a variety of details that all match the black-and-white palette. In the dining room, we find the organic forms of wall hangings juxtaposed with a jagged chevron pattern.
Downtown Loft
Baltimore Design Group
- No bachelor pad is complete without ruby-colored slippers.
The next stop on our journey is a downtown loft devised by the Port Washington, N.Y.-based Baltimore Design Group. The dwelling is a study in regal opulence, with some classical accents and a hint of Old World gentility. As with many interiors in this style, the space is not strictly black and white, but a sepia-infused interior embellished with one or two flourishes in Technicolor. (If you look closely, you may spot a pair of ruby-colored slippers with golden tassels.) This bachelor pad worthy of Bruce Wayne illustrates the power of a neutral color scheme to offset, and underscore, household objects. In other words, it makes them pop.
“Captain’s House”
Patrick Mele
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A black-and-white interior need not be one or the other but can also include beige, pewter and an endless number of variations on the black-white spectrum. In Patrick Mele’s “Captain’s House,” named for a portrait of a young naval officer above the mantelpiece, a charcoal wall rhymes with the spots of a leopard pattern and offers a visual counterpoint to the peach and fuchsia upholstery of a cushion. In another room, the generous use of white paint all but erases the stones of the hearth, creating a sense of continuity between wall and floor. This young designer’s expert use of a black-and-white palette is evident in every detail, from the striped wallpaper (one of his hallmarks) elsewhere in the home to the plumage of the stuffed bird to one side of the naval captain.
Park Avenue Triplex
Amy Lau Design
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Sometimes a black-and-white space finds its way into a dwelling bursting with color, like with Amy Lau’s Park Avenue Triplex. Here, certain rooms are given over to saturated colors, as with the poppy-colored walls of the bedroom or even the tropical hues of a Diego Rivera (1886–1957) painting in the living room. Nonetheless, these chromatic flourishes are balanced with areas dominated by black and white, like this dining room furnished with a sinuous and spiky black chair (that brings to mind a stiletto) and a mosaic of geometric wall hangings. The designer is renowned for her use of color, but this family residence demonstrates that rich shades and a black-and-white palette are not mutually exclusive. With an eclectic sensibility and taste for innovation, Lau received an honorary doctorate from New York School of Interior Design in 2012.
Glenn Gissler Design
Michael Kors’ Penthouse, NYC
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In this interior from Glenn Gissler Design, Michael Kors’ penthouse in New York City has been outfitted with black-and-white furnishings to match the refined sensibility of the client. This is consistent with Gissler’s professional philosophy: “Every assignment involves taking a comprehensive view, one that [responds to] the specifics of the client’s personality and lifestyle.” The prevailing aesthetic is cool and understated, from the pattern of marbling in the bathroom to the lounge chairs to the modern coffee tables.
East Side Apartment
Christopher Coleman Interior Design
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The logical conclusion of the vogue for black-and-white interiors.
Our whistle-stop tour concludes with an East Side Manhattan apartment designed by the Hudson, N.Y.-based Christopher Coleman Interior Design. A quick glance at Mr. Coleman’s profile will reveal his predilection for bold fields of color—from a canary-yellow sofa to soft furnishings in the shade of blue sapphire—but here the designer has fully committed to the principal of black-and-white design. Color has been banished from this home, with the exception of one or two small objects on the kitchen counter, which smolder on a black-and-white ground.
This East Side Apartment pushes the vogue for black-and-white interiors to its logical conclusion and reaffirms the creative potential of limiting (or eliminating) color from a domestic space. In a world saturated with color, the use of black and white allows for a place of meditation away from the hurly-burly of modern life. In this context, chromatic touches are downright electric, as with the ruby-colored slippers of the Baltimore Design Group’s downtown loft, or the bowl of fruit in this apartment. And, for a multi-level dwelling like the New York style-brownstone from Taylor Hannah Architects, black and white is an organizing principle, a way to bind together many parts. For these practitioners, the salt-and-pepper aesthetic is not just a professional fad, but a pathway to bold and experimental design.
