“When I first saw the house, all I could see were design challenges”, — remembers Betsy Brown: “There is a great hall right at the front door that serves as entry, living room and dining room. A lack of obvious gathering spots and organizational axes made the house very uncomfortable and there were massive walls asking for huge art or tapestries”.
To achieve one of the project’s main objectives — to showcase the homeowner’s collection — the interior designer started by focusing on some of the key pieces by Robert Polidori, Yasuhiro Ishimoto and Ray Metzker. At 62 years old, attorney John Hagefstration — who founded a real estate investment company — has donated hundreds of photos to Birmingham Museum of Art in his hometown.
“His current favourite pieces are cameraless works called ‘photograms’ created by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray and others who worked at the Bauhaus in Germany and the New Bauhaus in America, as well as works by students of the Institute of Design in Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s, such as Ray Metzker”, says Brown. But that’s not the extent of Hagefstration’s interests. He is also passionate about vintage furniture, and so, dining chairs by Axel Einar Hjorth, lamps by Marcel Breuer and a credenza by George Nakashima, among others, adorn his home.
“A fun part of the process was traveling with the client to shop for antique rugs and mid-century furniture”, remembers Brown. “On our first trip we toured Richard Shapiro’s amazing house in Los Angeles.”