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Baron Alessandro R. de C, Albrizzi opened up his first of many shops all over the world in 1968 at One Sloan Square in London. When the words "Jet Set" meant following the sun in Pucci prints to a bossa nova beat. Albrizzi was there. With panache and sophistication he translated the spirit of swinging London into a line of furniture and objects that were just right for the times. Fortunately, his extensive knowledge and love of classical furniture allowed him to sensitively design a line that has transcended that giddy period and is now classic modern design.
Albrizzi furniture and objects compliment a wide variety of styles from Baroque to Bauhaus. "Albrizzi is a crisp foil to good antiques," says Peter Vaughn, Managing Director of Albrizzi Design Inc., "Because of the collection's civilized proportions, Albrizzi furniture and objects fit in and enliven a wide variety of traditional interiors. In a contemporary space Albrizzi is the essence of refined modernism. No fat."
Hand-crafted with precision using acrylic, glass, stainless steel, aluminum and wood, the Albrizzi line of objects and furniture prove once again that the best modern design is usually made by hand.
Tall, urbane and strikingly handsome, Alessandro Albrizzi attracted an instant cult following in 1965 when the Venetian-born designer opened a shop in London to launch his new venture: an innovative line of handcrafted furniture and objects made from brightly colored perspex.
Located on the fashionable King's Road in Chelsea, the Albrizzi store had sleek black walls designed to accentuate the lit-up perspex a novel material at the time. The business was an overnight successand catapulted the innately laid-back designer into the forefront of the swinging sixties.
"Alessandro was very much at the avant garde," recalls Arabella Lennox-Boyd, a longtime friend of the designer who invested three thousand pounds in the fledgling business a considerable sum in 1965. Lennox-Boyd admired her friend's talent and believed he would be successful. She was also dazzled by his good looks and charm.
"Alessandro was God," Lennox-Boyd says. "He was so good looking."
Effortlessly charming and charismatic, Albrizzi exuded an aura of languid, aristocratic detachment that added to his appeal for his many admirers of both sexes. A enthusiastic reader of Proust, he delighted in pointing out the foibles of his Jet Set contemporaries, comparing them with self-aggrandizing characters from A La Recherche de Temps Perdu. "He was sometimes a little vicious," a friend recalls, "but very funny."
Some of the most popular items in Albrizzi's London store were his modish, stackable Perspex cubes, designed to store books or objects, and backgammon tables in oxblood, black, beige, white, bright red and translucent smoke the designer's signature hues. Forty years later, these objects are collectors' pieces, prized by decorators and aficionados of Jet Set design.
The overall look was exuberantly modern, but Albrizzi's designs were based on the elegant proportions of 17th- and 18th-century decorative arts a sophisticated perspective came naturally to the designer, who spent his childhood amid the baroque splendor of Palazzo Albrizzi, his family's 17th-century house in Venice.
Born in 1934, Baron Alessandro Rubin de Cervin Albrizzi was the eldest of three children born to Minervena and Giovanni Battista Albrizzi, who divided their time between Venice and two spectacular country houses: Villa Albrizzi in Este, 70 miles from Venice, where the ballroom pavilion was decorated with jaunty rococo stucco, and the 12th-century Castle of Enn, perched on a wooden mountainside near Bolzano. (The family's wealth and property derived from Dada Albrizzi, Alessandro's great aunt, who had bequeathed her vast estate to Alessandro's father on the condition that the male heir should take the surname Albrizzi to ensure that the dynasty would survive in perpetuity.)
Alessandro inherited his prodigious design talent from his father, a stylish, good-looking man who struck one family friend, Jean Baudrand, like a character from the 1920s: "He always wore gaiters and looked incredibly smart," Baudrand recalls. Giovanni Albrizzi was a talented amateur painter and collector of ship models, and designed Harry's Bar, the famous restaurant in Venice, which was founded by his friend Giuseppe Cipriani.
The senior Albrizzi's design legacy continues: the famous Cipriani logo of a stylized bartender shaking a cocktail is still emblazoned on plates and glasses at all of the company's restaurants in Venice, Hong Kong, New York, London and Porto Cervo. "He did it because he was a friend," says Countess Alba Gianelli-Viscardi, Alessandro's sister. "He never made anything for money, my father."
As a teenager Albrizzi became a keen amateur photographer. His parents indulged his interest by allowing him to travel on commercial ships during summer vacations and he returned with rolls of photographs and notebooks to prepare articles for Venetian newspapers. An unexceptional student, he went to school in Switzerland and moved to Florence to study law at the urging of his parents.
Famous in his youth for his good looks, Albrizzi enjoyed many dalliances with men and women before he began dating Maria-Theresa Ginori, a beautiful Florentine aristocrat, in 1957. He was 22, she was 21. The couple moved to Paris, where Albrizzi embarked on a career as a freelance writer and photographer for Connaissance des Arts, a popular culture magazine, and for L'Oeuil, and Plaisir de France. "He was doing many articles on various places in the French countryside," Maria-Theresa recalls.
The couple married in Florence in 1964 and moved into a flat at 23 rue du Bac, a fashionable address on Paris's Left Bank, near the rue de l'Universite. "We had a very intense youth," Maria-Theresa recalls. "Alessandro was great fun, he knew everybody, and we had a very pleasant, worldly life together."
The early bliss of marriage did not last. A year after the wedding Albrizzi began making frequent trips to London without his wife. He had fallen in love with Tony Cloughley, a handsome young architect who was a partner in Garnett Clougley Blakemore, (GCB) a firm whose adventurous, modern designs were emblematic of the cool, swinging sixties.
Cloughley's jet-set designs had attracted the attention of David Hicks, the famous British interior designer, who had helped the young architect by inviting him to collaborate on a series of prestigious private commissions, including a new townhouse in London's Belgravia for Hicks's father-in-law Lord Mountbatten of Burma, a former First Sea Lord of Great Britain who had served as the last Viceroy of India. Cloughley and his firm also designed the electric Kool-Aid interiors of the Chelsea Drug Store on the King's Road, made famous by the Rolling Stones' movie You Can't Always Get What You Want and later used as a set for Stanley Kubrick's movie A Clockwork Orange.
Albrizzi was intrigued by GCB's style of pure geometric forms, and by Cloughley's use of glass and aluminum, which melded with pop styling, stirring the imagination of Londoners recoiling from post-war austerity and connecting pop culture with a wide cross section of society. The Venetian photographer had no training or experience in design, but Cloughley's space-age aesthetic inspired him to begin designing objects using a clear transparent plastic known to scientists as polymer polymethyl (PMMA), more commonly known by its trade names: Perspex, Lucite, and Plexiglass. (To avoid confusion, this article will refer to it as Perspex, which was developed in 1928 in various laboratories and trademarked by the Du Pont company in the early 1930s, when it was used as a shatterproof substitute for glass for aircraft windows and boat windshields.)
Cloughley helped Albrizzi to translate his early sketches for Perspex cubes and prototypes for tables and consoles into working drawings that could be used for commercial production. The notion of creating his own line of products opened up an exciting world of possibility to Albrizzi, who gladly abandoned his photography career and began spending less and less time in Paris.
"He started to go every week to London," Maria-Theresa recalls. Although she regretted her husband's frequent absences she understood that it was important to him to pursue his dream of becoming a successful designer. "Alessandro needed to have a business and a passion to prove he could do something on his own," Maria-Theresa says. "Really he was an amateur photographer. It wasn't really what he wanted to do. He needed to do something more creative, and in England they gave him the opportunity."
Albrizzi founded his own business in 1965 with Cloughley's assistance. The Italian's privileged background gave him easy access to friends with trust funds who were eager to invest in a fashionable enterprise, including Lennox-Boyd and Guy Nevill, another partner in the business, who offered financial support and impeccable social credentials. Educated at Eton, he had served as Page of Honour to Queen Elizabeth II, his godmother, from 1958 to 1961, and his parents, Lord Rupert and Lady Angela Nevill, were close friends of the Queen and Prince Philip. The fifth partner in the business was Vivien Clore, a London socialite who was the daughter of Sir Charles Clore, a millionaire British businessman. Headstrong and high-spirited (she would later jokingly describe herself as "bossy, arrogant and practically unemployable"), Vivien had developed a crush on Tony Cloughley. Flattered by her attentions, Cloughley teased Albrizzi, his male lover, that he was thinking of getting married.
"Vivien was very attracted to Tony and it drove Alessandro crazy," Jean Baudrand recalls. "And it was amusing Tony, of course."
Albrizzi was not the only designer to use Perspex in the mid-60s. "One company was burying objects in perspex an opened tin of sardines or a blown-up watch," says. "Those were gimmicks. Alessandro never went into gimmicks. He was making beautiful objects created by skilled artisans."
One of Albrizzi's early designs was a clear-Perspex candlestick entwined with a pair of gold snakes, which were inspired by the 17th-century snake-wreathed window pulls at Palazzo Albrizzi. Before long he was designing furniture and accessories, Perspex place-card holders, cigarette boxes, ice buckets and backgammon boards.
Arabella Lennox-Boyd ran the shop until she left after a year or so to begin her career as a famous garden designer. Cloughley was too busy with his architectural business to be able to focus on the day-to-day activities of Albrizzi Designs, which Alessandro ran almost-singlehandedly.
"He looked after everything," Baudrand recalls. "He was like a one-man orchestra."
Albrizzi continued to commute to Paris, but it was clear that his heart had shifted to London, where he was sharing a basement flat at 29 Royal Avenue in Chelsea with Tony Cloughley. When Maria-Theresa gave birth to a son, Lorenzo, in 1967 the Albrizzis celebrated his baptism in Venice with a joyous reception held given by Peggy Guggenheim, the eccentric American heiress, at her palazzo on the Grand Canal. The couple decided to separate shortly afterward, but they remained close. "We were always on very good terms and always great friends," Maria-Theresa says, "because we were young together."
With the Albrizzi business flourishing in London, the partners decided to move the store to a larger space at 110 Fulham Road, near the Chelsea Arts Club. "It was very glitzy and modern, with everything in plastic and chrome," says Peter Schlesinger, the American artist, who was living in London at the time. "It was so un-English, in a way," he added. "It was so shiny and plastic, the opposite of everything else then."
In 1968 the Albrizzi shop moved again to 1 Sloane Square, an elegant address on the corner of Sedding Street and Clivedon Place. The glamorous store, occupying the ground and lower floors, was designed by Tony Cloughley's firm GCB, taking its cue the aristocratic Italian designer's love of Perspex, glass and stainless steel.
The Albrizzi product line was expanding: the firm had begun selling a line of carpets of geometric designs, a line of lacquered furniture with tables and consoles of varying heights and a range of Chinese-inspired furniture made in Europe to Albrizzi's specifications. Other popular items were Perspex butler's trays, umbrella stands, cantilevered desk lamps and coffee tables.
Around the same time, Albrizzi and Cloughley acquired a house nearby at 16 Chester Row, behind Eaton Square, where they entertained in style. "Alessandro was a very fashionable man in London at the time," recalls Andree Mourgues, the Paris socialite. "He was very friendly with Princess Margaret and he knew the most interesting people of the time." Friends noticed numerous Albrizzi objects in the princess's suite of rooms at Kensington Palace, including a Perspex bridge table used frequently by the queen's sister.
The atmosphere at 16 Chester Row was warm and inviting. "Alessandro had a big, fat Italian lady looking after him who had been his nanny," Jean Baudrand recalls. "We would have dinners there and she'd prepare simple but delicious Italian food." Guests dined at an octagonal Perspex table that became Albrizzi's most famous, and distinctive, design. Comprised of an octagonal (or, alternatively, rounded) tabletop made of three-quarter-inch glass, it rested on a curvy clear-Perspex base that resembled the movement of waves.
To match the tables, Albrizzi designed an elegant range of dinner plates. The two most popular designs were also octagonal: a white plate with bamboo-shaped borders, and a green-and-white plate with hand-painted green bamboo leaves. There were also sets of rectangular white plates with a single hand-painted black tulip in the center which were designed by his father, according to Alba Gianelli, Alessandro's sister.
The plates were manufactured by Este Ceramiche, a 250-year-old factory that was close to the Albrizzi family's villa in Este, an ancient town located 50 miles from Venice. According to Nino Fadigati, the owner of Este Ceramiche, the factory is still producing the white bamboo plate, which is sold all over Italy.
Building on the success of his Sloane Square store in London, Albrizzi opened a store in Paris on the corner of rue de Grenelle and Boulevard Raspail with the financial assistance of Alain La Riviere, the scion of a wealthy Argentinian family. The exterior of the shop was dominated by big red letters spelling Albrizzi's name an oversized version of the designer's signature.
Visitors recall the Paris little store as a small, avant-garde emporium with a geometric Albrizzi carpet and filled with perspex consoles that were popular among Parisian socialites. For the first six months the Cloughley-designed store was run by Gilles Dufour, the fashion designer, who was then a student. Dufour proved to be an excellent ambassador for Albrizzi style. Famous for his beauty and charm, Dufour had a wide circle of friends and admirers including his mentor, Karl Lagerfeld, who would stop by to shop on a regular basis.
John Loring, the American design director of Tiffany %26 Co. began noticing Albrizzi designs in fashionable houses in London and Paris during the late 60s and early 70s. "Everybody had to have an Albrizzi backgammon set and a stack of open perspex cubes, with books stacked up inside," Loring recalls. "And everyone had to have an Albrizzi geometric carpet and a perspex candlestick with a perspex snake coiled around it at their Albrizzi dinner table, and an Albrizzi coffee table with curved chrome-and-steel x-shaped supports."
"In Paris we'd go into an apartment and say ÔEntierement perspex!'" (entirely perspex) Loring continues. "And the Albrizzi stuff looked great at the Albrizzi palace, in Paris apartments and in swinging London."
Loring, who had known Albrizzi before his foray into design, was impressed by what his friend had accomplished: "To come from where he did, with all that baroque splendor at home in Venice, and to create this great modern look of the 1960s was quite an achievement. And his things still look terrific. They stand up well today, because all of those Albrizzi things were beautifully proportioned and beautifully made."
After the successful launch of his Paris shop, Albrizzi opened a store on Madison Avenue in the Carlyle Hotel. Once again, Alain La Riviere provided funds to acquire the lease and helped with the running of the store. "It was a nifty little shop full of wonderful stuff," recalls Peggy Kennedy, the furniture editor of American House and Garden during the 1970s. "And it was a great location. People on Park Avenue who wanted to inject a bit of currency into their apartment would buy Albrizzi things and just snap them into place."
Albrizzi played an active role in design and running the business, but he was seldom in the store."Being a shopkeeper wasn't really Alessandro's thing," Kennedy observed.
Albrizzi goods became fashionable in New York. "People were crazy for it," Gilles Dufour recalls. "Diane and Egon von Furstenberg were buying it for their Park Avenue apartment. All the hip people of that time were filling their apartments with Albrizzi furniture and objects."
Thirty years later, Dufour still has an Albrizzi desk in his bedroom in Paris, and a Perspex cigarette holder. "I don't smoke anymore," he says, but I loved the object, so I kept it."
Preston Phillips, a young Southern-born architect whom Albrizzi's befriended in the mid-70s, was impressed by the quality of his work. "There was such a gorgeous scale and detail about everything he did," Phillips recalls, "and a quality about his products that were unique at the time."
When Connoisseur magazine published Phillips' downtown Manhattan loft a few years later, he recalls, "one of the pictures had the twin-snake Albrizzi candlesticks, and I got so many positive comments about them."
"Alessandro said that they were extremely hard to fabricate," he added.
The technology involved in manufacturing Albrizzi's designs was still new, and the costs involved made them too expensive for most consumers. Part of the problem was that material was prone to flaws, which could easily ruin the elegant see-through effect that was the hallmark of its appeal. "Perspex looks shoddy if it's not beautifully finished," John Loring says, "and the designs were quite intricate."
American interior design magazines responded enthusiastically to the sleek Albrizzi look, which seemed to embody the prevailing hip aesthetic of the 70s. "Perspex was like diamonds so expensive," says Mary Jane Pool, who became aware of Albrizzi's work during her tenure as editor of American House %26 Garden during the 1970s. "But it just seemed so rightÊat the time, so fresh. And the electric colors were just wonderful. You could put those Albrizzi cubes in any kind of room. They were like sculpture."
The Perspex objects were not the only expensive items in Albrizzi's stores. A black lacquer side table with ivory inlay cost $4,000 to produce in the late 70s, resulting in a hefty price of $8,000 on Madison Avenue.
Exorbitant prices posed less of a problem on Worth Avenue in Palm Beach, where Albrizzi opened a store in 1970. The manager was Charles Coburn, a part-time decorator, whose keen interest in Palm Beach society, and his friendship with grandes dames, helped to attract customers to the store.
Oddly enough, it was a dress shop on Worth Avenue, one of the famous Martha fashion boutiques, that galvanized interest in the Albrizzi wares in Palm Beach. Lynn Phillips, the daughter of Martha Phillips, the proprietor, was planning to update the look of her mother's boutiques when she spotted the perfect object in the window of the Albrizzi store: a beveled glass-topped table supported by a pair of chrome carpenter horses.
Phillips replaced the somewhat fussy, old-fashioned rococo furniture in the Martha boutique with objects from the Albrizzi store, including the glass table, chrome and natural cane chairs, chrome cubes, and mirrors of different heights.
"It was an instant hit with everyone," recalls Jim Rogers, who was Martha Phillips's chief assistant at the time. "People in Palm Beach were accustomed to furnishing their houses with French provincial antiques, or copies, which were usually heavy," Rogers says. "But the Albrizzi pieces lightened up the whole thing. Everything looked modern. Even a classic, almost dowdy dress when placed in this environment looked fresh and new and contemporary. Even the old ladies loved it."
As a result, Rogers recalls, "A lot of people in Palm Beach started buying Albrizzi things for their homes when they saw how Martha had arranged them. They saw how compatible it was with other period pieces."
Albrizzi enjoyed spending time in Florida, but he was beginning to tire of the travel schedule involved in commuting between his stores in four cities London, Paris, New York and Palm Beach. By 1973 he calculated that the heyday of swinging London had passed, and he and Cloughley began setting their sights on America. Albrizzi acquired a two-bedroom prewar apartment on East 66th Street in Manhattan and threw himself into the task of transforming it into a more liveable space, knocking down walls to create an enfilade in the front, next to a long line of south-facing windows overlooking the street.
Albrizzi was proud of the apartment, which in its new configuration became a showpiece for his designs. Friends remember it as stark and contemporary, with antiques mixed in with Perpex.
Albrizzi and Cloughley had planned to live together in New York, as they had done in London. But shortly after acquiring the apartment Albrizzi was shocked to discover that his lover had already taken the lease on another New York flat and that Cloughley was enjoying a hectic romantic life with multiple partners.
"Alessandro was a gentleman and an extremely generous and nice person," a friend of the couple recalls. "Tony was talented and could be great fun at parties but he wasn't loyal." Tony's defection, the friend added, caused Albrizzi "a big heartache."
Their domestic partnership was over but Albrizzi and Cloughley remained business partners, and the English architect was resourceful in furthering the Albrizzi brand.
"Tony was more of a promoter," Peggy Kennedy recalls. "Alessandro probably would never have made it into our offices at House and Garden without Tony, who could be quite pushy. Alessandro was the opposite, very laid back, but they bounced ideas off each other. They were yin and yang."
Kennedy loved Albrizzi's innovative designs. "He was doing bright colors, just enough to jolt us in the 70s," she says. "The only piece I was able to afford was an umbrella stand in my front hall. I thought ÔYou've made it!' Now you see copies of Albrizzi open cubes in places like West Elm. People today have no idea that those touches came from Alessandro."
With Cloughley pursuing romance elsewhere, Albrizzi began spending time with Preston Phillips, a handsome, 26-year-old architect from Alabama who worked for Paul Rudolph, the eminent modernist architect in New York. Eager to help his young friend, Albrizzi arranged for Phillips to do some work as an executive architect on the Georgette Klinger store that Cloughley was designing on Madison Avenue.
"Tony didn't have much time for me," Phillips recalls, wryly.
Traveling to Venice with Albrizzi for the first time was an eye-opening experience for Phillips. "Stepping into Palazzo Albrizzi is something I'll never forget," he says, "because it gave the full picture of where Alessandro came from. All the door handles, and the window pulls, had these 16th-century bronze snakes. It was odd but fabulous."
The palazzo's famous ballroom made a memorable impression. "It's one of those magical spaces," Phillips says. "Literally the entire ceiling was a crescendo of life-sized angels, trumpets and clouds. And the house has a large garden, which is unique for Venice."
Walking around Venice with Albrizzi was a dizzying experience. "They called him ÔBarone' wherever he went," Phillips says, "whether it was the meat market or the flower market, or restaurants." The family's long relationship with the Cipriani family ensured that he received a particularly warm welcome when they wandered into Harry's Bar. "I feel lucky to have known him and loved him," Phillips says. "He was so at ease with himself. In New York he was just another guy."
Albrizzi occasionally pretended to be chagrined that his social standing had been diminished by his successful design career. "Alessandro would say, ÔI'm really no longer a member of the Italian nobility. I've descended to the streets as a mere tradesman,'" Loring recalls. "He liked to play the part of a very spoiled little boy. That was his charm."
Albrizzi's home in New York reflected his European roots with a contemporary Perspex twist. "His apartment was really quite wonderful," says Mary Jane Pool, the editor of House and Garden magazine who published it in 19TK. "He knocked down a wall and put in big windows and he decorated with beautiful Venetian side chairs, and other things from the palazzo. It was very comfortable, very inviting."
To Pattie Sullivan, a longtime friend in New York, Albrizzi possessed the best imaginable style. "He had grown up surrounded by the height of European taste, with Longis on the wall, rare porcelains and silks," she says. "And he was blessed with this extraordinary eye. He always reminded me of Henry James, with the cynicism and understanding and complexity of the European mind. He embraced the freshness of America, and adored New York, which really became home for him."
Peggy Kennedy remembered being struck by the beauty of an unlined red linen Roman shade that Albrizzi installed in his study. "It was a reference to the red linen curtains that were in his Venetian palazzo," she recalls. "The light coming through the shade mellowed everything. Nobody else in New York was doing those kind of touches. There was something poetic about it."
Kennedy admired Albrizzi's refined European style. "The apartment wasn't flashy in any way," she recalls. She also also enjoyed Cloughley's cavalier brio. "Tony was very dashing, with his British clipped humor," she says. "It was great fun to spend time with him at parties. He was always full of life and onto the next thing, with the right people. He was a good designer, but he couldn't resist the good life, the parties, the whole scene."
To Kennedy, Albrizzi seemed a paragon, with a gentle sense of humor: "He was totally adorable and so gentle, such a sweet guy," she says. "One day I was wearing a bunny fur miniskirt with a matching vest with tights and tall boots. Alessandro did a sketch and handed it to me with a smirk."
Beneath his mask of civilized restraint Albrizzi could be a capricious troublemaker. "He always up to some mischief," Loring recalls. "When Alessandro was bored he liked to stir up the dust. He'd say, ÔAs the old lady on the ocean liner said, what we need now is a storm.' One of his favorite tricks was to drop a piece of silverware on the table during a dinner party, which got everyone's attention. Then he'd look down the table and address some hapless guest and say, ÔThat was so entertaining what you just said. You must repeat it to the whole table.'
"He loved to watch them squirm," Loring adds.
Albrizzi, who was multilingual, took delight in confounding party guests by replying in different languages. "He'd answer you in French, then Italian, then German or English, never letting you settle on a single language for the conversation," Loring recalls. "Then he'd act extremely annoyed with you if you couldn't keep up."
"He was extraordinarily charming and handsome, and had tremendous style," Loring concluded. "He could be terrific and remarkably horrible when he wanted to, which was not infrequent."
Loring was not the only close friend struck by the dichotomy between the benign and mischievous sides of Albrizzi's character. "He was so generous and so kind," Pattie Sullivan says. "But it amused him to make trouble. It was a hobby of his to stir the monkeys up a bit. He loved gossip, and loved creating it. One time, I was given the message that someone expected him for dinner and he said, ÔIf they did not invite me directly, I'm not going.' He could be very Venetian and complicated."
In Venice, Albrizzi expected house guests and family retainers to whip up sublime feasts for a multitude of lunch and dinner guests. "All the basic supplies, and the wine, were from the family estate," Sullivan recalls, "but there would be nine chickens to feed 90 people. Alessandro would be lying there languidly, expecting miracles. He'd say, ÔYou must cook it in gelŽe, like at Fauchon."
Even so, Sullivan says, Albrizzi could be a delightful friend and surprisingly modest. "He was proud of what he'd accomplished in his career but it was not his style to brag or reminisce."
According to James Lord, the writer and social observer based in Paris, Albrizzi possessed remarkable human qualities. "He was a tremendously talented, sensitive, intelligent, shrewd person," Lord says, "and he wore his nobility very lightly. It was there, but it didn't intrude at all in his relations with other people. It was quite amazing to be in that palace with him. In spite of the grandeur and magnificence it was as if you were in a little house somewhere. He took it for granted, which was perfectly natural."
Mary Jane Pool, a frequent house guest at the Palazzo, was also impressed by Albrizzi's understatement. "He knew everyone but he was not a namedropper," she recalls. "He'd always know whom to call, and how to do the right thing. One time some people gave a lovely lunch party for us and I said, ÔShould we send them flowers?' And he said, ÔNever for lunch. Only for dinner.' So he did live by little rules."
Fleming admired what he called Albrizzi's "keen sense of observation. No one could pull a fast one on Alexander," he says, using the English translation of his friend's name. "He was very sharp, and tremendously cultured in literature and design, and the art of living. He was very meticulous about his entertaining. It would be mixed, eclectic. And he was a very loyal friend."
In New York, Albrizzi's business was thriving in large part because of the many interior designers who appreciated the subtle beauty of his work and influenced many of their clients to shop at his Madison Avenue store. In the mid-70s Albrizzi seized a chance to move his store to a larger space on the 7th floor of the famous Decorators and Design building on Third Avenue, known in the trade as the D%26D Building.
Remarkably, he was able to persuade his friend C.Z. Guest, the legendary blond New York socialite, to represent the Albrizzi brand in the D%26D Building. Her husband Winston Guest, an heir to the Phipps steel fortune, had suffered a major financial reversal in a series of investments that turned sour and the beautiful and enterprising Mrs. Guest, an accomplished horsewoman and garden columnist, seemed amused by the opportunity to present the chic, modern designs of her aristocratic Italian friend. (Guest also rented adjacent space from Albrizzi to represent the whimsical furniture of Willy Rizzo, the famous Parisian paparazzo.)
One of Guest's best customers was Susan Gutfreund, the Fifth Avenue socialite-turned-interior designer, who was living in Texas at the time. "After my first marriage I had a house in Forth Worth and the whole place was Albrizzi," Gutfreund recalls. "He had designed a Perspex stereo system that was quite expensive at the time: $7,500. But it was beautiful."
When she moved to New York in the late 70s and began collecting important 18th century French furniture, Gutfruend put her trove of Albrizzi tables, consoles and other objects into storage. "I paid storage for 23 years," she says. "But I was just so reluctant to get rid of it."
At the urging of her husband, she decided to part with it and approached Sotheby's and Christie's for an appraisal. "They didn't think there was a market," Gutfruend recalls. "I was so shocked, because I remembered it was such a chic thing in those days." Tragically, her Albrizzi collection was destroyed while in storage.
"Timing's everything," Gutfreund says ruefully. "Now Albrizzi things are fashionable again."
By the late 70s it had became obvious to Albrizzi that interest in his designs had peaked. Quietly, he closed his store in Paris, the showroom in the D%26D Building and the Palm Beach store, keeping only the London store. "He knew the times were changing," Phillips says. "Carter was president and inflation was at 22 percent. And there was a general shift in taste. The whole hi-tech thing that came in the early 80s changed everything. Jay Specter, Angelo Donghia, Halston and lots of people whose aesthetic was perfect for Alessandro's things and who'd been actively promoting his products were retiring or dying."
"Alessandro didn't seem too preoccupied by the change," Preston Phillips recalls. "In a way the business had a life of its own and he was moving onto other things. He took up photography again, which was a great passion."
Albrizzi's designs had given Perspex a reputation for chic sophistication but by the end of the 70s, "Perspex had a bad rap," according to Hiram Williams, the Southern-born investment banker who had become Albrizzi's partner in 1976. "There was so much overproduction of bad stuff, with cheap TV stands and magazine racks and other things," Williams recalls. "Plastics were going out of fashion."
When his father died in 1980 Albrizzi inherited the piano nobile of the family palazzo and began spending more time in Venice, devoting himself to the task of restoring the palazzo. Cloughley had moved to California, making it impossible to conduct a productive business partnership and in 1982 Albrizzi sold the lease of his London store to its longtime manager, Hugh McLaughlin, effectively terminating his design career. He continued to live in New York, his adopted city, and became an American citizen in 1982 a decision that startled his Italian relatives.
He began a fruitful collaboration with Mary Jane Pool on book projects that excited his imagination. The Gardens of Venice was published in October 1989, with Pool's elegant prose and Albrizzi's subtle color photographs, followed in 1992 by a second volume, The Gardens of Florence. "Alessandro knew everybody, so all the garden gates were open to us," Pool recalls. Albrizzi was still working on a third book, The Gardens of New York, when he died in Venice after a protracted fight with cancer on February 3, 1994, aged 59.
Today, more than 40 years after the launch of Albrizzi's first London store, his designs are sold around the world and enjoying a newfound popularity a revival that would have amused and delighted their creator. In 1988 the Albrizzi line of furniture and objects was revived by Hiram Williams and his partner Peter Vaughn, the New York decorator, using the same manufacturers used by the master. In New York, the furniture line is represented by the Liz O'Brien Gallery on Fifth Avenue, and the objects can be found at some of the leading designs stores around the world, including Dieci Corso Como (Milan), Paul Smith (London), Colette (Paris), Moss (New York), Liz O'Brien Gallery (New York), Jonathan Adler (New York), Twentieth (Los Angeles),The Corner (Berlin), Kuball %26 Kempe (Hamburg), Space (Sydney) and Loveless (Tokyo).
These days, newly fabricated prices range from $195 for a perspex box to $30,000 for a custom-made perspex dining table. Vaughan has added a couple of lamps one large, one small to the Albrizzi line and has also introduced several new colors including pale blue, apple green and orange, that reinforce the timely, contemporary feel of Albrizzi's designs.
Despite the passage of time, Vaughn says, it is still very challenging to create Perspex objects without flaws: "We're always trying to match Albrizzi's superb quality and attention to detail," he says.