SheltonMindel Designs a Miami Home Fit for Beach Days

Every story has a backstory. The Florida condominium Interior Design Hall of Fame member Lee F. Mindel shares with his work/life partner, José Marty, is a tale of lucky strikes emerging from downbeat situations. The plot unspools as the SheltonMindel founder and architectural designer were awaiting takeoff from New York to Miami for a project meeting, when their client canceled last-minute. They flew south anyway, then were forced to quarantine there as COVID hit. The city was effectively dead, Mindel recalls. “It was doom and gloom.”

Given the Mindel’s art-world ties—he is a chairman of the Design Basel and Design Miami vetting committees and owns Galerie56 in TriBeCa—it’s no surprise the place hosts enviable pieces. Though precious price-wise, they portray a breezy insouciance. A neon “MIA” at entry might be taken for the city’s nickname but is really part of a 1940’s sign sourced in Helsinki. Furthering the upbeat vibe there is Kate Shepherd’s Endless Summer, in Miami Vice hot-pink tones. Hanging on the floor-to-ceiling oak divider separating living and guest areas, Gisela Colon’s dimensional acrylic sculpture resembles “something you might see under the sea,” Mindel says. A diminutive Josef Albers work rests oh-so-casually on the oak kitchen’s counter. Big and bold in the adjoining dining zone are Domingos Tótora’s pressed-paper circular construction and a piece by Seymour Fogel, and the beachy guest chamber displays Rupert Deese’s oil-on-plywood disc recalling raked sand. Even the main bathroom gets the art treatment: Nightshop’s round P.O.V. in resin, acrylic, and ink.

A Miami Abode Designed to Spotlight Art and Color

cassina: sofa (living area), sofas, table (balcony)

through galerie kreo studio: cocktail table (living area)

through friedman benda: chair

Chilewich: floor mat

bitossi: vase

kartell: stool (living area), side tables (main bedroom)

the future perfect: floor lamp (living area), stool (bathroom)

artek: stools (balcony)

molteni&c: cabinetry (kitchen)

marc krusin: table (dining area)

cappellini: stools

venini: glass artwork

galerie jacques lacoste: panels (main bedroom)

miniera: floor lamp (main bedroom)

pierre marie giraud: table lamps (bedrooms, foyer)

Tom Dixon: stools (bedroom)

SheltonMindel and Architecture + Information Earn an Iconic Old Classic Best of Year Award for a Private New York Office

2021 Best of Year winner for Iconic Old Classic

Experiencing perhaps the greatest James Turrell piece in New York doesn’t require a museum membership. You only need to have business to conduct with this family-run office. Rising through its double-height reception area is Turrell’s enormous hollow egg shape, a chamber that required a laborious six-month process to construct from white solid-surfacing and concealed LEDs. Typically for this master of light and space, his mysterious conceptual sculpture alters our perceptions. Once you enter the egg and encounter the shifting colors inside, everything outside it looks different for a few seconds.

Like the Turrell, its surroundings make us see the world differently. A Manhattan office, it turns out, can be as graciously proportioned and serene as a Palladian villa. That’s thanks to the impressive real estate: 40,000 square feet of a tower by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and even more so to the joint efforts of the interiors firms, led by Interior Design Hall of Fame members Lee Mindel, Brad Zizmor, and Dag Folger, the latter two the co-founding principals of A+I. Mindel relates the egg installation to the philanthropic work done by the client: “This is a metaphoric think tank. They desired contemplative spaces, as opposed to some others that we all know of. That’s something beyond interior design.”

sheltonmindel: Grace V. Sierra; Michael Neal; Marc C. Newman; Emily M. Meroney; Margaret O’Connor

Architecture + Information: Brad Zizmor; Dag Folger; Cheryl Baxter; Nisha Mary Prasad; Chris Shelley; Abby Kuskin; Aaron Whitney; Katina Max Kremelberg

This SoHo Loft by Lee F. Mindel is Anything But Soulless

2021 Best of Year winner for Large Apartment

You’d never guess that, before Lee F. Mindel came on the scene, this airy SoHo loft, home to a young art consultant, was a soulless, cookie-cutter three-bedroom in a new development. The firm principal blasted open the 4,400-square-foot floor plan—replacing Sheetrock with white-lacquered panels, white-oak partitions, and glass pocket doors—to instate more gracious spatial proportions and flowier circulation. Mindel’s strategy for giving grandeur to the standard-issue anodized-aluminum windows was to “thicken” the walls around them and darken their boxy depth in a manner reminiscent of Donald Judd sculptures. The result is akin to “dioramas framing views of the neighboring cast-iron historic buildings,” the Interior Design Hall of Fame member explains. “Plus, the added depth creates the illusion you’re in a masonry building.” Eschewing drop ceiling and downlights in favor of exposing the full volume of the space, Mindel installed luminous LED blades—rectangular in the living room, circular in the dining area—that lend activation overhead. “The idea,” the architect notes, “was that the ceiling, with these De Stijl–like overlapping graphics, become its own artistic plane.” Other than the living room’s Pierre Paulin sofa and the Maarten Baas dining chairs, furnishings are custom, designed by the firm to suit the newly salonlike spaces.

sheltonmindel: Lee F. Mindel