Archive
store design in focus on rodeo
december 2014
Beverly Hills — Rodeo Drive is revving up. The three-block-long thoroughfare now boasts more new tenants and storefronts than ever, a visible indication that luxury’s faith in the Golden State remains as strong as its love affair with Hollywood and its current fascination with Los Angeles.
derek lam: retail ambitions
july 2014
The designer named his contemporary collection, which was launched in 2011, Derek Lam 10 Crosby. That’s in the past, in a case of the proverbial door closes/window opensT the company — after securing a minority investment from Sandbridge Capital LLC in January — is moving forward with a focus on domestic retail: The first store for the Derek Lam 10 Crosby line, to be located at 115 Mercer Street and designed by William Sofield, will open in November.
rebuilt belstaff house a Labor of Love
september 2013
London — It wasn’t William Sofield’s expertise at designing retail environments that got him hired to work on Belstaff’s new global flagship in London. Although, with feathers from Tom Ford, Gucci and Bottega Veneta in his cap, credentials are impressive. No, it was for Studio Sofield’s residential portfolio.
The New ‘Old Money’ Upper East Side
september 2012
In condo conversions like Philip House at 141 East 88th Street, developers are riffing on the prewar character of buildings made famous by architects like Emery Roth. New buildings at 135 East 79th Street and at 200 East 79th Street use limestone facades and traditional elements, like the street-level window grilles at 135 East 79th Streets being built with prewar touches. 135 East 79th Street that the architect William Sofield says were made by the manufacturer of the gates at Buckingham Palace.
Grand openings
august 2012
In a city bursting with both new luxury boutiques and architectural landmarks, Harry Winston still made a conspicuous statement with the recent opening of its Shanghai store—the jeweler’s largest retail location yet. The new flagship boutique, located in the prestigious Xintiandi shopping district, embodies the brand’s inimitable style and intrepid vision for the future.
brian atwood’s big push
july 2012
Still in its early phases, the 1,500-square-foot space, designed by William Sofield, will have the largest selection of Atwood’s designer and contemporary collections, with more than 50 handbag styles. Atwood said the store will be driven by the designer line — which will occupy two of the four main areas, including 25 to 30 exclusive styles that will be available only at that location. B Brian Atwood and handbags will each have their own sections as well.
tom ford opens in los angeles
february 2011
The Rodeo Drive store is a distinet departure from the darker and more masculine environment of the 28 existing units worldwide. The emporium of pale grays and silver with high-gloss lacquer and glass exudes Los Angeles glamour and was designed to appeal to female customers. Ford and longtime collaborator William Sofield conceived the lighter and more streamlined design to reflect the light-filled and spacious feel of the City of Angels.
lawn art
Sofield restored the castle, creating lush garden rooms that echo its exotic nature and are filled with a profusion of tropical plants, including banana, yucca and palm, that need to be treated as annuls in our cold climate.
august 2011
finalists: suite
october 2009
The newest penthouse suite offers 1,400 square feet of muted opulence, with walls clad in tiger onyx and lamps made from Buddhist temple ornaments.
David Barton’s New Gym
january 1996
Barton turned to Aero Studios, the design firm of William Sofield and Thomas O'Brien, to make a gym with downtown energy and uptown grace. It was, he recalls, their proposal to use leather pads in the lobby that convinced him they were the right men for the job. According to the designers, the challenge was "to do a luxurious Upper East Side gym that didn't feel prissy." Their $2.5 million renovation employs a sophisticated palette of materials and a slew of special furniture and decorative objects to make this happen.
THE NEW LIVABLE MODERN
SEPTEMBER 2003
The new modern home is warmer, softer and far more eclectic than its spare, even spartan, predecessor. Here designer William Sofield, known for his inspired combination of clean lines and luxurious details at the Gucci and YSL boutiques he created with fashion designer Tom Ford, brings a classic midcentury house into the new millennium.
sexissimo!
April 2001
The message was clear at the much anticipated, celebrity-studded re-opening of Gucci’s New York store: Gucci is back and better than ever. A seamless interpretation of Tom Ford’s sexy, hard-edged designs for clothing, accessories, and housewares, the sleek new Fifth Avenue flagship represents the apotheosis of modern luxury. Conceived by Ford and interior designer William Sofield, the store is part of a continuing global rollout that debuted with the opening of Gucci’s London shop, followed by stores across North America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. The rollout not only represents a newly unified brand identity for the 80-year-old company, buy also reflects the modern sensibility of its creative director.
grand canyon
March 2001
There’s something very appealing about a man who can spend his days designing Yves Saint Laurent stores for Tom Ford and his nights sleeping with an enormous stuffed teddy bear. Not that Bill Sofield is eager for news of his toy bear to leak out; on the morning we begin shooting his Los Angeles home, the animal has been whisked away and replaced by an artful tumble of suede pillows. But when it comes to understanding Sofield, as a professional and as a person, that bear speaks volumes. “I like to maintain a balance in my life,” says the 39-year-old designer, whose clients include Sean “Puffy" Combs, Hollywood mega-producer Joel Silver, Ralph Lauren and, of course, Ford, for whom Sofield also created the much lauded, rigorously contemporary Gucci stores.
at home with bill sofield
March 1999
When Bill Sofield isn’t busy drawing up plans for Sean “Puffy” Combs’ new house or zipping off to Milan, Aspen or L.A. to put finishing touches on one of the 150 Gucci stores he is redesigning, he winds down in the converted theater he calls home, a loft conveniently perched across the street from his three-year-old New York City design firm, Studio Sofield. The sleek, sophisticated interiors he’s created for Gucci, the Solo Grand and Hard Rock hotels, and countless Donna Karan boutiques have launched Sofield -in only a few years - into design megastardom. Just home off the red-eye from L.A., where he was wrapping up the new Beverly Hills Gucci flagship and opening a West Coast design office.
aero spaces
March 1993
Sofield’s parents raised him in a vaguely Japanese house of simple planes, space interiors, and “such beautiful raw plaster walls that we never hung anything, which probably accounts for my tendency to lean rather than hang, artwork.” If there was a downside to this clean approach, it was his mother’s doling out to the garbage-man, over months, pieces of a cast-iron building facade that Sofield had way-laid en route to a salvage yard.
aero studios
March 1993
To hear William Sofield and Thomas O'Brien tell it, Aero Studios was born out of a playful, whimsical impulse a sort of Judy Garland/ Mickey Rooney-style “let’s all pitch in and open up a superswanky design atelier” escapade. The creed of reverse-chic, they say, dictated the basic premise: At a time when the design community is foundering on the rough waters of an industry-wide recession, when companies are desperately scrambling to scale down and cut back, the only option is to open a lavish furniture/art gallery and design studio catering to the very highest of high-end tastes.
william sofield
september 1992
William Sofield, principal of the recently formed design atelier Aero Studios, apparently hasn’t been keeping up with design journals lately. As we design writers have been noting ad nauseam for the past couple of years, that the 1980s were about flamboyance and grandeur and 101 other synonyms for ostentation, and the 90s about scaling back, paring down.
A House in Montauk
october 1993
We leave the bustle of the city, get off the highway, drive past Southhampton and its patrician residences, speed past Easthampton, invaded by tourists gaping at stars, or so they hope, and head toward the point of Long Island. As we approach Montauk, nature has reclaimed its due. There are sandy dunes, wild grass and the cries of seagulls fill the air.
Best changing room
January 2005
VIP treatment is not what it used to be. Everyone pretends that you’re their special person these days, that no footballer or film star would be more fussed over. But the new Romeo Drive Yves Saint Laurent Rive Guache flagship store really knows how to treat its most favored. The 10,000 sq ft outlet, an amalgamation of two existing buildings extended skywards, has a luxurious, private VIP room on the third floor.
Denver a-go-go
october 1998
It’s not quite SoHo, but the idea is the same for a downtown neighborhood in Denver, Colorado, not far from Michael Graves's new central library and Gio Ponti’s art museum. Unlike the cast-iron confections of New York’s SoHo, the Denver version is characterized by late 19th-century Romanesque buildings, some of which are being turned into loft residences for the upwardly hip. There is some new construction too.
bill me
january 1997
You see a lot of strange things in New York. But when you spot a six-foot-two man wearing huge black glasses and head-to-toe Gucci, strolling down Lafayette Street and balancing a precariously full pitcher of iced tea on a silver tray, it grabs your attention. These incongruities define interior designer Bill Sofield, whose gift for merging wildly different aesthetics has made him one of today's hottest talents. He’s also the ultimate host, even for a low key Saturday afternoon interview. After a quick tour of his half-completed studio in the Schermerhorn building, built by the architect behind the Plaza hotel and the Dakota apartments, Sofield grabs the tea and heads to the roof. There, he has set up a velvet-draped table and a Lucite ice-bucket with a bottle of champagne.
ralph Lauren Home
september 2013
“The Ralph Lauren Home collection was the invention of lifestyle marketing,” says designer Bill Sofield, who worked on and off for Lauren for 10 years in the very early stages of the home collection. “It was so unusual at the time that what was a clothing brand embraced furniture.” Indeed, who would ever think of turning a denim prairie skirt into a dust ruffle, or a Navajo blanket into a rug? It may have seemed unusual to the outside world, but the progression was perfectly natural for Lauren.
survival of the fittest
January 2010
Bare-bone gyms don’t stand a chance against these fabulous fitness facilities. The reception lounge’s 1970s driftwood benches and Elizabethan-style daybed contribute to a residential eclecticism—tempered by a memento more for the body beautiful: a vintage paper skeleton.
grand hotel
october 1996
Yes. This is the SoHo Grand Hotel, one of the more contentious and eagerly awaited projects in recent Manhattan history. SoHo, for those unfamiliar, is one of the city’s most unusual historic districts, filled with a melange of cast-iron structures unequaled elsewhere in the United States. It is also home to many of the city’s artists and, like many other Manhattan neighborhoods, has undergone a process of gentrification resented to some extent by its occu-pants. With the usual complement of the new "main street" emporia moving in, driving up local rents and driving out the small businesses, the district's longtime residents have been increasingly vocal about preserving what's left of SoHo’s idiosyncrasies.
aero dynamic
June 1995
If the atmosphere inside Aero seems chaotic, there’s good reason. Aero, located in a vast second floor SoHo loft, is many things: interior design studio, architectural office, antiques shop, contemporary furniture showroom, art gallery, literary salon. You can walk up and spend $25 or $25,000. Whatever it is, Aero is a success story. Since the day three years ago when partners William Sofield and Thomas O'Brien opened their doors, they were hot, and have only gotten hotter. They now have an impressive array of projects under their belts, from funky studio apartments and grand penthouses to a 15.000-square-foot shingle-style house in Maine. Having just completed the guest rooms in Peter Morton's new Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas, they are now at work on the forthcoming SoHo Grand. For Donna Karan, they have designed packages as well as boutiques in Geneva and Singapore.