For AD100 designer Andre Mellone, there’s nothing worse than a detached client. “My biggest nightmare is a person who says, ‘Carte blanche, do whatever you want, and I’ll see you at the end,’” he says. “Some designers might like that to avoid the friction in relationships, but for me that’s not where I get inspired.” He met his match with Lauren Santo Domingo, cofounder of Moda Operandi and artistic director of Tiffany Home, who reached out to the designer about taking on her family’s ski house in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
“Lauren really understands style and has a point of view,” says Mellone, who expected Santo Domingo’s mood board to be rather “traditional, classic, and elegant” and was left pleasantly surprised: “Her ideas and inspirations showed another side to her,” he says. “They were modern, masculine, and very midcentury design—all these references were smack into what I like but coming from her.” The auspicious beginnings bred a ski house refined in style and lacking of almost every, as Santo Domingo puts it, “chalet cliché.” Here, Mellone takes AD PRO behind the design of the mountain retreat, which graces the cover of AD’s December issue.
Perfect Fits
For Mellone, a winning interior is “a balance of vintage, custom, and contemporary.” It worked out perfectly, then, that during the design of this home, Santo Domingo ventured to Europe and paid a special visit to vintage design gallery Morentz in the Netherlands. “I said to her ‘I can’t believe you’re there, that’s one of my favorite places too,’” says Mellone, adding that Santo Domingo texted him a photo of her daughter at the gallery sitting in an Ovalia egg chair by Thor Larsen for Torlan Staffanstorp with the note: “We’re getting this.” The piece can now be found in the family room matching the rare Kvadrat-upholstered modular Novemila sofa by Tito Agnoli for Arflex.
A shared fondness for Morentz was just one of the serendipitous happenings. Both Mellone and Santo Domingo were eager to work with New York design studio Green River Project, whose daybed upholstered in fabric from Bode lends a pop of blue to the living room. But the anchor of this space is the Studio Mellone–designed L-shaped sectional, a reinterpretation of a work by the late Italian architect and designer Gae Aulenti. “This room had funky proportions—it was very skinny, very long—so it was important that this piece fit perfectly,” says Mellone, who created the sofa early in the process and determined the rest of the living room’s design choices around it.
