Thierry despont biography of donald

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You’re in Tribeca, but you don’t know where you are,” says French-born architect and artist Thierry Despont about “Le Cabinet de Curiosités,” a decidedly uncommon exhibition he conceived and curated inside the former New York Mercantile Exchange, a 19th-century granite-clad building in Lower Manhattan. Indeed, after climbing up a wrought-iron staircase, one enters a lofty dreamlike space, where contemporary art and antiques converge in transporting fashion.

The show, which remains open through January 31, 2012, is a collaboration Despont orchestrated between Marlborough, the international art gallery that represents him, and Steinitz, the Paris antiques dealership. For its part, Steinitz supplied exquisite 17th- and 18th-century boiserie to serve as backdrops, as well as magnificent pieces of furniture, including an 1810 Empire table on which Napoléon once sketched battle plans.

Marlborough, meanwhile, contributed works by two of its other artists, Spanish sculptor Manolo Valdés and the late Chilean painter Claudio Bravo. While Valdés’s large wood sculptures reinterpret figures from works by Velázquez and Picasso, Bravo’s canvases are trompe l’oeil compositions that include hyperrealist images of crumpled colored paper and the backs of paintings.

Completing the mix are Despont’s own artworks. A trio of his colossal Nebula paintings of imaginary planets hang prominently, while his assemblage sculptures are displayed throughout the space. Composed of found objects—mostly metal tools—they resemble insects and strange creatures ranging in size from tabletop- to human-scale.

Despont sees a strong “concordance” among the objects in the show, all of which are for sale. But he also relishes the arresting, unexpected dialogues that occur between pieces. “We are afraid of juxtapositions in today’s world,” he says, “which is one of the reasons I find museums so dry. I just wanted to show you can mix things up, that it’s a pleasure to let your imagination

Thierry Despont may be a wildly successful architect and designer, but that is never going to get in the way of his being first and forever a professional Frenchman. At 70, silver-haired and suave, he has the red rosette of the Légion d’Honneur decorating his buttonhole. His honey and gravel voice sounds as French as Maurice Chevalier eating a baguette halfway up the Eiffel Tower… 40 years of living in New York notwithstanding. Shortly after arriving in Manhattan, he was named consultant architect on the US’s most important historical architectural project: the restoration of the Statue of Liberty. “Because I restored that, people say, ‘He can do my kitchen,’” he laughs self-deprecatingly.

Despont is the starchitect you may never have heard of… unless you have a world-class monument to restore (as well as the Statue of Liberty, he worked on Paris’s Vendôme Column); a globally famous hotel that requires renewing (Claridge’s, the Ritz Paris and The Carlyle); an international flagship store to open (Cartier’s New York Mansion and Ralph Lauren’s London temple); or you’re just a regular billionaire in need of a status-appropriate roof over your head (Bill Gates, Calvin Klein and Mickey Drexler, inter alios). If so, Thierry Despont is the man you call. Were F Scott Fitzgerald writing today, his characters would live in Despont-designed houses and apartments.

He is busy on both sides of the Atlantic. “I’m just finishing 220 Central Park South, for developer Steve Roth, which is the most expensive, luxurious brand-new apartment building in New York, and I’m restoring the Woolworth Building, which is a great historical landmark where the upper 30 floors are being converted into apartments,” he says. Simultaneously, he is working on six London projects: two major hotels, a residential complex around the corner from 5 Hertford Street, and three private residences, including one of those Victorian stucco megama

French architect (1948–2023)

Thierry Guy Despont (19 April 1948 – 13 August 2023) was a French architect, artist and designer who lived and worked in New York City.

During the 1980s, he was the associate architect for the restoration of the Statue of Liberty. He then went on to remodel the Herbert N. Straus House at 9 East 72nd Street on Manhattan's Upper East Side for the billionaire Leslie Wexner of Limited Inc. fame (a home which later gained additional notoriety as the abode of Jeffrey Epstein).

Among the high-profile buildings in Manhattan he had designed the interiors for are 220 Central Park South, 53W53 (the interiors of the condominiums), and the Woolworth Building.

In the early 2000s, he designed the interiors for Gordon Ramsay's restaurant, the eponymous Gordon Ramsay at Claridge's in London. In 2005 he did alterations to The Promenade restaurant at the Dorchester, including fitting it with an oval leather bar the length of Nelson's Column. Between 2007 and 2010, he renovated the Lambs Club's former clubhouse in New York City into the Chatwal New York hotel.

In 2009, Despont redesigned the two restaurants and the bar Il Pricipe at the Hotel Principe di Savoia in Milan, Italy. Despont worked on the physical conversion of a section of the Battery Maritime Building in Lower Manhattan, into the 47 suite luxury hotel Casa Cipriani, which opened in late 2021.

Despont was known for being "the designer of choice for titans of industry," to cite his obituary in Architectural Digest. His clients included Bill Gates, Calvin Klein, Jayne Wrightsman, Annette and Oscar de la Renta, Conrad Black, Leslie Wexner, Peggy and Mickey Drexler, and Peter Morton. "To be successful at my job, one must be very good at understanding not only a client's needs, but also a client's dreams and memories," Desp

The bread and butter of Despont’s business, however—and his passion—is designing houses from scratch, inside and out. “Initially, we were only doing the architecture, but then I thought, I want to do it all,” he says, referring to the incorporation of interior decoration in his projects. “So that’s what I’ve been doing for the last 20 years. Honestly, I can’t work any other way. I can’t tell you where one stops and the other one starts.”

Mogul Empire

Despont characterizes his clients as “daring entrepreneurs” (they are usually referred to as “moguls”). “They come to me because they know I will give shape to their dreams,” he says.

In the 90s, his stock shot up after he designed a compound for Bill and Melinda Gates on a lake outside Seattle. Among his other showplaces are a shingled oceanside mansion in East Hampton for Calvin Klein and his then wife, Kelly, and a 64,000-square-foot Georgian-style mansion outside Columbus, Ohio, for retailing magnate Leslie Wexner and his wife, Abigail.

More recently, Despont has renovated a $75 million mansion on London’s Kensington Palace Gardens, purchased by Indian steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal and his wife, Usha. He has also built a chalet in Saint-Moritz for the couple.

For J. Crew C.E.O. Millard “Mickey” Drexler and his wife, Peggy, Despont has designed a succession of homes over the course of two decades. “Thierry is as good as it gets,” says Drexler. “If it is a renovation, he maintains the integrity of the building and improves upon the original. In any of his projects, he has incredible vision but gets all the details that most people never see.”

“I like to create a small universe,” the architect once explained. “From the master plan to the doorknobs, from the trees planted outside to the way people will sit and eat and dance inside, you create and control a whole microcosm.”