Drawing Room
Interior designer Mario Buatta, pictured against an illustrated backdrop by Sander Witlin, grew up in Livingston Heights, Staten Island, and became celebrated as the “Prince of Chintz,” decorating homes and apartments for everyone from Barbara Walters to Mariah Carey. “My mother and I used to drive around Staten Island and New Jersey just to gaze at houses,” he recalls of his childhood.
Worldly Flair
(Left) Buatta painted the 36-foot-long double-height living room in Hilary and Wilbur Ross’s New York pied-à-terre apple green and added the overdoor pediments; the painting is by Ivan Godlevsky. (right, clockwise from top left) In the Rosses’ previous residence on Fifth Avenue, he chose eggplant for the living room walls, “a great color on which to display paintings, and at night it reflects the city lights.” A star-studded gauze canopy in the same apartment’s master bedroom lends even more urban dazzle. Buatta employed glazed red walls and a Christopher Norman chintz for the curtains and seating pieces in the sitting room of a 1920s country house in Centre Island, New York.
Vivid Juxtapositions
At Hilary and Wilbur Ross’s summer home in Southampton (top left), Buatta created a mirror-image arrangement of dual seating areas studded with wicker and bamboo pieces and ceramic garden stools. Walls lacquered and glazed in a spinach-green crisscross pattern anchor an airy arrangement of three discrete seating areas in a living room in Bedford, New York (bottom left). For a 1976 showhouse in Morristown, New Jersey, Buatta complemented the master bedroom’s denim-glazed walls with Pierre Frey’s toile de Nantes on the tester’s curtains and headboard, adding an interior jolt of yellow for contrast (right). The mounted stag head and the floor, hand-painted to resemble an American quilt, add further whimsy to the space.