How Peter Marino Became Fashion’s Most Famous, In-Demand Architect
Peter Marino is totally fine with vague plaudits for his architecture and interior design work.
Asked their opinion of one of the many luxury stores he has designed — which include Tiffany & Co.’s The Landmark in New York City and Dior 30 Avenue Montaigne in Paris — visitors often tell him, “I like the whole thing.”
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He’s always tickled.
“There’s no greater compliment than saying that because I’ve designed the whole thing: the floors, the walls, the ceilings, the lights, the furniture,” he relates. “You know, very few designers really do the whole thing.”
Easily the most famous architect in fashion — and one of the industry’s most recognizable characters given his penchant for head-to-toe black biker leathers — Marino is also unique in that his New York-based practice is equally split between retail, residential and large buildings, like the sleek New Jersey headquarters of heart monitor firm Datascope. Peter Marino Architect turns out between 50 and 100 projects a year.
“What keeps me fresh, and the reason my clients keep coming to me, is we do private homes, no two of which are alike,” Marino says in an interview at the Cheval Blanc hotel in Paris, which he designed down to the doorknobs and throw cushions. “I don’t want to criticize my profession, but let’s just say, like in all professions, it’s easier to be lazy than to create something new each time you do a project.”
Both Dior and Chanel
Marino says he’s often asked, much to his chagrin, how he can possibly design retail stores for both Dior and Chanel?
“They’re so different, it’s like working for two private clients,” he explains. “[Gabrielle] Chanel had her aesthetic. She grew up in a convent, and she still liked extremely modern spaces, but with a touch of gold, and Venice and mirror. [Christian] Dior was, ‘Let’s restore France to the 18th-century grandeur that it was right after the war. I want absolute regular Louis XVII paneling. I want beautiful French chairs’…I have no trouble distinguishing between the brands.”
And there are others, including Louis Vuitton, Zegna, Graff, Bulgari and Fendi.
Marino is discreet about his private clients, but they are among the richest and most successful people on the planet who can afford yachts, private islands and multiple residences. He finds them endlessly inspiring, too.
“What I love about doing homes is I’m always experimenting,” he says. “We always make new textiles. I always design new carpets. I have new stone treatments. Half of what we do as wood isn’t even wood. It’s reconstituted. Things change really rapidly, and the residential projects are, for me, almost design studios in and of themselves.…We take a lot of what we learn from doing homes and apply it to our luxury stores.”
These days, Marino makes sure that visiting a luxury boutique becomes an uplifting, immersive experience. “You’re not just looking at a dress: You’re actually immersed in a well-designed space, carefully thought out and meant to make you feel joy and release — a little bit out of your ordinary experience in life,” he said.
The volumes of rooms can convey that specialness. “Space in today’s world takes us out of the everyday,” he says. Hence the generously proportioned rooms at Dior 30 Avenue Montaigne and the six-story stairwell at the Tiffany Landmark.
All About Touch
Textures also help boutiques become “aspirational places,” and Marino is mad for textures, pointing to the walls in his hotel suite, flecked with irregular indentations, as if someone had run fingers through wet clay here and there.
“Everything is tactile. And that’s my reaction to the computer, where nothing is tactile,” he says, now pointing to the heavy hotel curtains, flecked with squares of Lesage embroidery. “When you touch it, it’s not printed. There’s three-dimensionality to it, and life and realness. You can’t get that on a computer. Dare I say, I’m very touchy-feely?”
Erudite and articulate, but with a naughty streak and a ribald sense of humor, conversing with Marino is an exhilarating experience, and his enthusiasm is infectious.
He can’t say enough about the luxury brands he works for. “I love companies with history, and I love watching how they’ve changed and adapted over 150 years, and thinking, ‘Well, certainly I can push them forward to the next 50 years,'” he says, while also confessing, “When I open a boutique, trust me, I have butterflies in my stomach the night before.”
Born in Manhattan, Marino and his family — his engineer father, secretary mother and two older sisters — moved to the Queens borough in the ’50s. He displayed a creative bent from the get-go, playing the piano and drawing up a storm. He first studied painting and sculpture before enrolling in the architecture program at Cornell University. Upon graduation, he began his career at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, George Nelson and I. M. Pei/Cossutta & Ponte.
But it was a certain Pop Art artist he met via a key Cornell classmate that catapulted his career.
“I started by working for Andy Warhol, so you don’t get any bigger breaks than that, right, working on his 66th Street town house as the architect…and then I did The Factory,” he relates. “People still say to me, ‘You’re from Douglaston, Queens. How the hell did you meet all these people?’ And I go, ‘The Factory, The Factory, The Factory.’ How did I meet the Rothschilds? How did I meet the Agnellis? How did I meet Saint Laurent? How did I meet Valentino?”
Marino would first take on small jobs from his wealthy new friends — advising on wall-to-wall bedroom carpeting, or revamping a powder room. Eventually, he accrued enough commissions to open his own architectural firm in 1978.
He also made a key connection with the Pressman family, which in 1985 hired him to design the women’s retail concept for Barneys New York at 660 Madison Avenue. He would go on to design 17 Barneys locations in the U.S. and Japan, and his reputation in retail soon garnered commissions from Calvin Klein, Donna Karan, Giorgio Armani, Fendi and Ermenegildo Zegna.
Marino also forged strong relationships with Europe’s kingpins of fashion — Chanel’s Wertheimer family, with whom he began working in 1982, and LVMH Mo?t Hennessy Louis Vuitton chief executive officer Bernard Arnault, who he linked up with in 1995 — plus the likes of Americana Manhasset owner Frank Castagna.
He rattles off a list of upcoming luxury mega projects for Chanel, Dior and Tiffany in such cities as Milan, Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles, Seoul and Hong Kong.
Meanwhile, large-scale buildings in the works include a Cipriani hotel in Venice and Raleigh condominiums in Miami.
Arnault said Marino came onto his radar when he was looking for an architect “who could translate luxury into an immersive experience.”
According to the French luxury titan, Marino’s “innovative approach and reputation for blending art with architecture made him a natural fit for LVMH. The first assignment I gave Peter was for Dior where he set a new standard for flagship stores, creating a space that embodied the brand’s spirit.”
Over his long career, Marino has “redefined luxury retail by creating spaces that are not only visually stunning, but where customers feel engaged and connected,” Arnault says. “He goes beyond selling products, designing environments that invite people to linger and immerse themselves in the world of our brands. His success comes from constant innovation and keeping the customer, and how they feel in a space, at the heart of every project.”
“Part of My Family”
Arnault went on to describe him as “passionate, meticulous and daring. He thrives on challenges and always aims to exceed expectations. Our working relationship is built on an earned trust and I appreciate his openness to feedback. His blend of artistic vision and collaborative spirit makes him a joy to work with. He is one of the most talented architects I know, and we became friends. He is, de facto, like part of my family.”
Given his bespoke approach to each assignment, Marino is loathe to site specific design signatures, but he readily admits to his reputation for spectacular marble bathrooms.
He credits his wife Jane Trapnell, a noted costume designer, who is always extolling him to design a powder room as a power play.
“There’s nothing worse than a gorgeous restaurant and a pig bathroom. So I always make the client spend far more than they would ever budget,” he says with a smirk, noting that marble quarries in Carrara, Italy, routinely put aside their most exquisite and expensive stone for him.
In the ’80s, when he did a lot of work in Japan, Marino convinced the Imperial Silk Factory to “loosen up a few bolts” and sell to him. More recently, he convinced Hosoo, a historic maker of kimono textiles in Kyoto, to make wider looms, which launched it into the interiors category, with Marino a marquee client. Today, the architect works with an array of specialists in textiles, glassware, paint finishes and handwoven carpets.
“All over the world, we work with specialist makers, and that’s why it’s pretty hard to copy a Peter Marino job,” he says. “You would have to have been in business a few decades in order to get the resources that we have.”
He works with about 150 collaborators in his New York office, which has dedicated rooms for key clients like Chanel, Tiffany, Dior and Louis Vuitton.
A Lover of Leather
Like the late, great Karl Lagerfeld, whose white ponytail, high-collared shirts and dark glasses became a kind of visual shorthand, Marino is known the world over for this leather-daddy getups, which owe a small debt to WWD.
Early in his career, Marino wore jeans and T-shirts, because that’s all he could afford, later adopting Armani suits after designing an apartment for the Italian designer in 1988. But he would change into biker leathers, including chaps, when he drove out of town for the weekend on his Triumph Speed Triple.
On one occasion, he neglected to change from his riding gear, lest he be late for an interview appointment with WWD. He apologized profusely to the reporter for his appearance, but she insisted he looked fabulous.
When he reported this reaction to Trapnell, she gave a thumbs-up to the style switcheroo, saying “‘at least you don’t look like one of those boring architects who wears khaki,’ my wife being one of those sharp-tongued Episcopalians.”
Today, the architect designs all his own black leather pants and jodphurs, snug leather shirts, leather jackets and leather accessories, which include leather police caps à la Marlon Brando, or General Eisenhower, worn at a jaunty angle. Further toughening his appearance are claw-like rings of his own design, some depicting multiple bird heads.
He relishes his outré appearance, which he wears in a winking style that suits his salty humor, and his knack for witticisms that often skew scandalous. As a key host for a fundraising gala at Chateau de Vaux-le-Vicomte last October, he added a lace ruff and black pearls to his snug leather regalia as a nod to the castle’s roots in the 17th century — and to dazzle guests such as Hélène Mercier-Arnault, Paloma Picasso and Marisa Berenson.
“I’m not a very dry architect,” he deadpans, before bursting into laughs. “I like to have a good time.”
Given his high profile, and distinctive style, Marino has been approached at least half a dozen times to design a capsule collection for fashion brands he won’t name. “I’m flattered. And I came very close to two,” he teases.
So why did he say no? “We discussed it and my associate Curtis said, ‘Do you really want to walk down 57th Street and see someone coming at you who looks like you?'” he says with a chuckle. “It’s bad enough on Halloween when there are always 30 or 40 Peter Marinos at every party.”
But when it comes to creating chic, ultra-luxurious buildings, homes and stores, there is only one Marino.
How does he juggle retail projects, especially since fashion moves so quickly, whereas architecture is considered the most lasting of design disciplines?
“Although I’m hired to constantly keep the brand up to date, there’s also always the instruction to make sure this store you do, which is costing the earth, doesn’t go out of date. So that’s a bit of a trick where you’ve got to make it lasting,” he says with a wink.
Marino credits roughly two decades of experience designing private homes before he embarked on his retail career.
“I was never known for, like, a trendy home look,” he says. “I quickly learned that if you’re trying to be the trendiest, hottest, most cutting-edge person of the moment with your design, you’re not going to be in the success league, because inevitably, your look of the moment is almost going to be a fashion statement.
“To have a design career as long as mine, in architecture and design, is pretty rare for somebody who doesn’t have a ready-made look. People are going, ‘I can’t wait to see your new creation.’ It’s a whole different thing,” he explains.
His 2021 Phaidon book, “The Architecture of Chanel,” spotlights 16 of the many buildings he designed for the French house, all in the brand’s signature black and white, but extremely varied, from the sugar-cube-like shapes for Los Angeles to an asymmetric stack of black rectangles for Seoul. “So you use the codes of the brand. But you never do the same thing twice, ever,” he explains.
His latest Phaidon title, “Ten Modern Houses,” showcases lavish and transporting residences in locations like Southampton, N.Y.; Aspen; Faqra, Lebanon; Ramatuelle, France; Skorpios, Greece, and the Dominican Republic.
Marino has received numerous prestigious industry awards, including 22 citations from the American Institute of Architects for architectural design excellence, the first Hirshhorn Leader in the Arts Award and a Hadrian Award from the World Monuments Fund. In 2017 the French Ministry of Culture named him Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
Art Is Key
Key to Marino’s practice is his background in fine art, which is why early in his career he began to incorporate site-specific artworks into his projects.
For example, the necklace-like glass sculptures of French artist Jean-Michel Othoniel can be found draped in many Chanel boutiques — across four floors in the building he designed in Beverly Hills. Visitors to other Marino-designed boutiques can encounter works by Rashid Johnson, James Turrell, Vik Muniz, Michal Rovner, Gregor Hildebrandt, Antoine Poncet, Richard Prince, Jenny Holzer, Johan Creten, Sarah Charlesworth, Tony Cragg, Not Vital, Sarah Sze, Vera Lutter, Lee Bul, Beatrice Caracciolo and Julian Schnabel.
“Because I’m a big art collector and I come from a fine arts background, artists have influenced me enormously in that they are always trying to create something. They’re trying to do things that are aesthetically better, aesthetically unique. I mean, that’s pretty hard when you think about it. Yeah, that’s why I’m so proud of my bronze boxes,” he says, referring to the hulking cabinets and chests he creates that are sold via Gagosian.
Marino is an eclectic collector, often choosing unfashionable objects like cookie jars, or Renaissance and Baroque bronzes. Most recently he bought a Fang sculpture.
“I like to buy whatever’s incredibly beautiful and of good quality,” he says. “I think a great work of art is something that when you look at it, it defines everything: the place in which it was made, the time it was was made, the society. That’s why I think people who said Warhol was not a great artist are wrong. If anyone nailed America, whose values were Brillo, Heinz, Coca-Cola, fast cars and Hollywood celebrities, it was him.”
But his proudest achievement to date is establishing the private Peter Marino Art Foundation, which opened in 2021 in Southampton, N.Y., in what was previously the Rogers Memorial Library. He funded its purchase with proceeds from his bronze box artworks.
“I have great fun with it,” he enthuses. “It’s my absolute favorite hobby, and we have three or four different shows per year where I’ve highlighted what I think are the most influential artists of our times.”
Anselm Kiefer, Georg Baselitz, Erwin Wurm, Tom Sachs, Rovner and Johnson have all mounted exhibitions in recent years.
“I’m wildly flattered, no artist has ever said no to me,” he says. “Next year we’re going to have an incredible show, turning the whole thing over to Wolfgang Tillmans.”
He sees the foundation as a path to immortality.
“I mean, what’s going to last? I don’t know if 100 years the studio is going to last, but I think the museum will last,” he said. “That and my bronze boxes.”
To be sure, he doesn’t seem to be the type to author an autobiography.
“I’m 100 percent a visual person. Actually, make that 1,000 percent. I mean, people ask me to write an introduction to a book, and after three sentences, I go, ‘I really can’t do this,'” he says. “I adore fashion because it’s all about, ‘How does that look?’ Just take the simple concept of how you dress a woman, and it’s never been the same for 2,000 years. It’s so fascinating, the variance all of us clever, clever humans can come up with. I adore it. And so I’m hoping to do 1,000 different looks in my lifetime, too.”
This visual person sums up his raison d’etre: “I like making things look like what my eye likes.”
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