A Life on the Skyline | Culture | Vanity Fair
First came the building: 40 Bond Street, the Pritzker Prize–winning architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron’s first in New York City. Ian Schrager, the groundbreaking impresario of boutique hotels (the Delano, in Miami, and the Royalton, in Manhattan, for example), developed 40 Bond as an elegant rethinking of the cast-iron building sheathed in high-tech green glass. The finished product was so alluring that he decided to move into the penthouse and to add a pavilion on the roof. He commissioned the master of hyper-minimalism, John Pawson, to design his new home.
Herzog and de Meuron are not exactly baroque designers, but Schrager tells me he wanted to work with Pawson to try to get “close to my own true aesthetic. Jacques, whom I was originally going to hire, understood.” And so, apparently, did Pawson when Schrager hired the French interior designer Christian Liaigre to furnish the apartment. Landscape architect Madison Cox planned the manicured roof garden. “The architecture, the air, and the light are Pawson—the bones, the brilliant way he framed the views,” says Schrager. “I went to a minimalist architect, but I said, ‘I don’t want a minimal apartment.
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