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Southern Accents "Classic Design Always in Style"

SOUTHERN ACCENTS MAGAZINE

Classic Design Always in Style

by Kimberly Goad January 2009

One was built in the 1880s as a carriage house; the other as a sculptor’s studio in 1919. Over the years, the houses shared little more than a sidewalk in New York’s Greenwich Village, until Armand Hammer-the wealthy and flamboyant industrialist purchased the two and combined them. By the time Richard Sammons and Anne Fairfax, the husband-and-wife team behind Fairfax & Sammons Architecture, bought the place in 2000, the redbrick house with the colorful past was in desperate need of attention. In a city where a house is almost never a home-most people live in apartments-it had sat empty for 10 years. "It didn’t sell because no one knew what to do with it," says Sammons. "We looked at it and started chomping at the bit." Their plan? Essentially undo what had been done and reconfigure the space to suit their needs, as well as their design philosophy. Sammons recalls Hammer’s apparent weakness for leopard prints and window boxes filled with fake flowers. Not exactly the aesthetic on which the two architects-who were both trained at the University of Virginia, where they met on the first day-had built their practice, which has offices in Palm Beach and Charleston, in addition to New York.