Her Own Space
Sally Sirkin Lewis stands in the middle of an opulent penthouse bedroom suite, its soaring glass walls open to the twinkling lights of an urban skyline. “This is my dream room!” she exclaims. “This is space, it’s serenity, it’s what my life is all about!”
Lovingly, she points out details of the movie-star suite with its mahogany four-poster bed and side tables and glass-top consoles under massive mirrors in gold-leaf frames. She points out antiquities she’s purchased in Bangkok, and her new “Retro ‘97” sofa.
These are pieces the energetic Lewis created herself, right down to an impressive steel pick-up-sticks sculpture that she tossed off when the entrance needed something that wouldn’t block the sight lines. The penthouse--a million-dollar installation--is the crowning touch to a retrospective at the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising in Los Angeles.
“I took a look at it and realized I haven’t lost my nerve,” says Lewis, the first interior designer to be honored by the institute.
“Sally Sirkin Lewis: 25 Years of Design” is a tribute to one of California’s most influential interior designers. When Lewis opened her Melrose showroom 25 years ago, she named it J. Robert Scott for her son “because a woman’s name didn’t fly.” Today she’s pushing for name recognition as the person responsible for the 1,000 textile designs and more than 600 chairs, sofas, desks, beds and accessories that have made J. Robert Scott synonymous with glamour and elegance.
And since a divorce settlement two years ago gave Lewis full control of the company with its 200 employees, she has overseen a major expansion of her small empire--for instance, she’s opening a London showroom in the spring. “I was married to a man who believed that women should take a back seat,” says Lewis, whose personal reticence belies a fierce sense of focus. “Now I’m in charge.”
“She’s a natural entrepreneur,” says her niece, Joan Barmat, a former New York investment banker who’s now the company’s chief financial officer. “She woke the company up a bit. We’ve had a compound revenue growth rate of more than 20% a year since she took over, though we don’t expect to keep growing at that rate. Sally’s a driven person with a vision that’s pretty pure: She sees it and goes after it. She was one of the first to do both furniture and textiles, and a lot have followed her.”
In fact, Lewis, 64, who’s been preaching a rarefied version of simple design for years, seems to have arrived at many trends ahead of the crowd. When she opened her showroom in 1972 it created a sensation with the airy, white upholstered furniture, big batik pillows, sisal carpets and palm trees that came to be known as the “California look.”
Looking back, the feat seems daring, says Lewis. But at the time it made sense.
“I always liked space and I loved contemporary art and African art and Indian art. I took an old hippie restaurant, knocked down all the walls and put in lots of light and huge palms.”
The result was a showroom that went well beyond the usual furniture display with its lines of lamps, couches and coffee tables, creating an unexpected departure from the prevailing country French prints and small, dark furniture.
“There was something about that showroom,” recalls Los Angeles designer Jack Lowrance. “The minute you walked into all those neutrals, and that open look, you felt a fresh new approach.”
And it was a look that Lewis, along with the late Michael Taylor of San Francisco, is generally credited with popularizing.
It is typical of Lewis that, when approached by the Fashion Institute’s Maggie Murray to do a retrospective, she bypassed the usual custom of showing a piece from each year and created her lavish movie-star environment. “We literally built this room and foyer, and it took two months,” she says. “I talked Maggie into it and I’m sure she rued the day, when she saw all those workmen and building materials tracking in.”
Murray, the school’s visual director who curated the exhibit, says she never had a moment’s concern. As a curator, she looks at the Lewis designs and sees the classical origins of the pieces, such as an Egyptian army camp stool behind her X-shaped Exxus Table.
“I might have taken a more ‘teacherly’ approach, but this room was Sally’s idea and it works. It’s stunning and powerful and totally different,” says Murray. “She does everything--I came down a couple of days and she was ironing the sheets.”
Sarah Medford, a senior editor of Town & Country, says: “This is an interesting time for Sally to get this attention because many of her abiding interests in design--such as textured fabrics and pared-down amounts of furniture in a room--happen to be rising to the surface.”
The show highlights such Lewis trademarks as bleached wood floors and pale leathers, striking combinations of modern art and antiquities, Lucite and polished steel upholstered furniture. The unifying factor is a passion for contemporary art. A serious collector, Lewis once moved to a larger house to accommodate Adolph Gottlieb’s 9-foot “Pink Smash.”
Lewis describes her work as “the natural product of my environment.” As a child growing up in Brooklyn, her sensibility was shaped by her artist mother and her grandfather who cut coats and suits for the Fifth Avenue clothier Milgrim’s. “I learned art from my mother and textiles from my grandfather,” says Lewis, noted for her use of linens, heavy cotton brocades and nubby boucles and such dressmaker details as double-folded pleats and skirts on classical furniture.
An animated conversationalist, Lewis is sitting in her office, wearing a trademark black Chanel suit, gold and diamond Art Deco brooch and chunky bracelets. The office walls are bare except for a picture of Lewis with then-Gov. Bill Clinton. She’s a political activist--”I like causes!”--and ardent fund-raiser for Democrats.
Her desktop of polished granite holds only a telephone--Lewis hates clutter. (“I create enough pandemonium in my mind.”)
There is reason for the pandemonium. Her week’s schedule includes New York, Boston, Palm Beach, New York again and then off to Bangkok, Thailand. She visits everything from flea markets to textile mills (she deals with 28 mills in 12 countries), standing over the looms in Thailand to change a weave if necessary. “I’m the world’s best packer,” boasts Lewis, who limits herself to two small bags, two pairs of shoes and one color. (“I’d be crazed if I had to worry about clothes.”)
Although she is described by some design writers as a kind of elegant diva, in reality Lewis says she is rather shy. “I’m not a pushy lady. I’m sometimes accused of being aloof in the showroom, but it’s only because I’m preoccupied.”
Lewis had planned to be a fashion designer until a 1950s encounter in Miami Beach when a woman approached her with the request to decorate her house. “Her name was Shirley Mischnoff and she was in her 30s, which seemed very old to me at the time, and she said she’d been watching me come into the club and liked my style,” recalls Lewis, who still remembers what she was wearing--a gray flannel pleated bathing suit.
Within a month, Lewis was on a flight back to Miami Beach from a New York buying trip. “I suddenly realized--my God, I’ve spent $35,000 of Shirley’s money--which was a fortune then, and never even measured a wall!” But the house was a success. She used deep green grasscloth walls with white molding, bleached wood furniture and floors, and black and white accents.
Sipping water from a crystal goblet, Lewis talks about 25 years of working with the singular goal of creating homes that are tranquil environments for some very complex clients. She is accustomed to being called a workaholic and acknowledges a near-compulsive need for perfection.
The catalyst for Lewis’ current surge of activity is her divorce from Bernard Lewis, which gave her total control of the company. (“I went into her office after the divorce,” says a friend, “and she had a sign on her desk that said: ‘CEO and sole owner.’ ”) “I look around and I’m the boss,” Lewis says. “Now I can do all the things I always wanted to do.”
Just over the past few months, she has introduced her new Renaissance furniture line, opened showrooms in Chicago and Washington, D.C., and expanded her New York showroom. She built a new factory in Inglewood to house both textiles and furniture.
She has sold high-end furniture to such Hollywood stars as Barbra Streisand, Glenn Close, and Frank and Barbara Sinatra, and decorated houses for such clients as Joni Mitchell and Dinah Shore. It’s not uncommon for wealthy clients to decorate their entire house with the Lewis classical-modern signature.
“People who love it, love it unqualifiedly,” says Los Angeles designer and friend Kerry Joyce. “It’s absolutely her own style. Sally doesn’t do avant-garde. She’s not trying to make a theatrical point. She might push limits, but it’s to achieve what she wants, not make headlines.”
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Long before trend-tracker Faith Popcorn popularized the notion of “cocooning,” Lewis was preaching the concept of “home as serene retreat,” and she has some definite formulas. “First of all, the space has to be right--the bones of the room. You don’t jolt the senses with a lot of disturbing pattern and color all happening at once. When I look at a room and my eyes are landing everywhere, it almost sets my equilibrium off.”
Home for Lewis includes her wire-hair fox terriers, Robbi and Mitzi, and an indefatigable housekeeper, Marianna Dzierbinska, who “keeps me healthy--she’s the most important ingredient in my life!”
She recently was leading a crew for the Discovery Channel’s “Interior Motives” on a tour of her art-filled Beverly Hills home, which, she explains, has “all the ingredients for what I define as simple living.”
Simple, in the Lewis world, is far from spartan. “My dining room is just a table and four chairs, no rug, no table linens,” she notes as the camera pans over an awesome table that could pass for an art installation, its polished stainless-steel base sculpted into a square of hand-beveled glass.
But Lewis insists there are basic formulas, no matter what the furniture or art budget, passing along three tips to anyone seeking to create a simple environment: Use neutral backgrounds; bare floors, whether wood or stone; and less furniture than you originally wanted. The goal for any home, she repeats firmly, even dogmatically, is to be uncluttered. “I am very orderly. I don’t like a lot of mess--I can’t handle it.”
Lewis has resisted technological intrusion--even voice mail--and uses the weekends to call close friends and family. Her son, Jeffrey Robert Sirkin, is a rare-books dealer in Washington, and her daughter, Shelley Sirkin, is a theater producer in Boston.
“I was just saying this morning to Shelley, this is a major turning point in my life right now,” says the designer. “It’s like these atoms are racing across my mind, there is so much going on.”
Her work, which has been regularly covered by Architectural Digest, is being discovered by other design magazines, including House&Garden;, House Beautiful and Italian Vogue. She will be honored in January with a Sally Sirkin Lewis day during the California Winter Market at San Francisco’s Design Center.
And although her major focus is business travel, she still designs a house from time to time, to keep in touch. Most of her clients have similar pressure-filled lives, she says, and seek her out because they want a home that is a tranquil retreat. She recalls a recent phone conversation with a client, a very busy professional woman building an immense house in Palm Beach, Fla.
“She called me about 9 p.m. sounding so tired and said she was just exhausted with meetings and travel and the stress of everything she was doing.” Lewis’ voice drops to a soothing key: “I said, ‘You have given me the perfect line. I understand. You’ve been fortunate that you hired me, though you may not know it. Instead of being so terribly involved in what I’m doing, why don’t you sit back and relieve yourself of this one pressure and let me handle it for you. I know what to do for you: This is 40 years I’m in this business, I’m well traveled, I understand pressure more than most women.’ ”
Lewis is a strong supporter of women, starting with her own business, which is a near matriarchy. “This company has been built by women,” she reflects. Senior Vice President Ellen Isenson has been with her almost 25 years, “and many of the other women started in their 20s and have grown up in the business.”
It was not so much a conscious decision as the fact that women were her hardest workers, she says. “They were the ones here late, the ones who would open up on a weekend morning for a Johnny Carson or whatever rock star wanted to come in.”
While Lewis hasn’t missed the irony of being widely recognized for work she’s been doing for decades, she admits enjoying the new attention and calls the retrospective the thrill of a lifetime. It has set her to thinking about the contributions of her multifaceted career.
“I think I gave designers another avenue,” she says, referring to her move from decorator into starting her own design lines. “Clients can be very tough. I was fortunate--if someone was impossible, I could say, ‘Let me give you your money back.’ But a lot of designers can’t afford that, and I showed them another avenue.”
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On View
“Sally Sirkin Lewis: 25 Years of Design” is at the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising, 919 S. Grand Ave. 11 a.m.-3 p.m. Monday-Saturday, through Dec. 12