DE S IGN CENTRE
BACK TO THE FUTURE
American designer Thomas O’Brien has made his name creating interiors, lighting and furniture pieces that evoke the past and embrace the future. Here he talks to Charlotte Abrahams about his inspirations, his passion for shopping and the importance of beauty
“I have always been a shopper,” interior and home furnishing designer Thomas O’Brien tells me when we meet, over Zoom naturally, at his home in Bellport, Long Island. “When I was a child, my grandmother, and then my father, took me to antique stores and to auctions where whole houses were taken apart revealing these layers of time. I found the history, beauty and craftsmanship of all these objects fascinating.” Those early experiences sowed the seeds for the
l iveable-take-on-the-modern-rooted-in-the-past aesthetic that has become O’Brien’s signature. But it was working for the fashion designer Ralph Lauren that set him on course to launch Aero Studios and thus become one of America’s leading tastemakers, a designer featured on both the Elle Decor A list and Architectural Digest’s Top 100. It was 1986. O’Brien was 26, an art graduate fresh
out of The Cooper Union in New York and Ralph Lauren’s first flagship store had just opened on Madison Avenue. O’Brien wrote to the then creative director
Jeff Walker asking for a job and was hired to “be the person for the Home collection. There were skirted tables with potpourri everywhere,” he remembers, “so I said, ‘why don’t we do a living room with the upholstery and open up a wall to make a trellis room.’ Jeff agreed. Ralph came to see it and a month later I was going up to Bedford to see this house he was going renovate.” That house was Lauren’s home, the handsome stone one featured in many of the brand’s advertising campaigns, and O’Brien was its interior designer. “Jeff and I did so much shopping!” he says. “We flew to London and did all the antique shops on Pimlico Road and then to Paris for the markets. It was all about looking and finding and was a heavenly way to learn.” Six years later, O’Brien was ready to go out on his
own. His idea was to create a design studio and store that would work together in a single space and, in 1992, Aero was born. Opening on SoHo’s Spring Street, Aero caused an immediate sensation. “The store was this beautiful open space, set up as three big rooms and
filled with a blend of my own designs, vintage things that we refurbished and things we bought,” he explains. “And clients had to walk through it to get to the studio so it acted as this touch point for design inspiration.” Amongst those early clients were the fashion designers
Donna Karen and Giorgio Armani and the luxury retailer Tiffany. Karen and Armani commissioned O’Brien to design some of their boutiques (Armani added his home on Central Park West to the job list too), while Tiffany spotted his potential as a product designer and asked him to create a collection of crystal, dinnerware and cutlery. It was a partnership with department store Marshall
Fields that led O’Brien to the collaboration for which he is probably best known – lighting for leading American manufacturer Visual Comfort. O’Brien was already designing lights for Aero, one of which – a small alabaster lamp – was already illuminating the desk of Visual Comfort’s founder and President Andy Singer so it felt like serendipity when the Marshall Fields’ buyer
ABOVE: Designer, merchant, collector and tastemaker Thomas O’Brien in his office. RIGHT: O’Brien’s New York apartment speaks volumes about his approach to decorating and his understated yet cultivated tastes. The striking ‘Nina’ lamp, which he designed for Visual Comfort, takes pride of place on a cabinet
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