Architecture + Design

Jed Johnson

Contemporary instincts tempered by a flair for historical allusion

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Jed Johnson had the ability, more finely honed than that of any other interior designer of his time, to pick the best and integrate it, quietly, into a serene new whole. He was not a traditionalist and he was not a modernist, and his work was not minimalist and it was not full of clutter. Johnson embraced everything, and yet he was not an eclectic, with his work dependent on unexpected juxtapositions. It is more that he interpreted every style in a way that marked it as his own. His rooms full of French antiques had an intuitive discipline and restraint. His modern rooms possessed a deep, glowing sensuousness. Johnson had the rarest gift of all among designers, the ability to go against the grain and somehow bring out the truest manifestations of any style. He designed against type: His traditional rooms were marked by an unexpected rigor, his modern rooms by an unexpected degree of emotion. Yet they always seemed right. It is as if Johnson had a kind of gyroscope inside him that kept everything on center.

His beginnings were atypical—he came to New York in 1968 from his native Sacramento, California, and found a job at Andy Warhol's Factory. He spent twelve years with Warhol, working on his films but eventually settling into the part of the artist's life that he felt more comfortable with, which was helping Warhol assemble his collections. Warhol was a rapacious collector, and it fell to Johnson to give his acquisitions some order. Being Warhol's curator was, in a sense, the beginning of his decorating career, where he learned to discriminate between good objects and great ones, and where he learned to love things as distinctly different as Art Déco furniture and antique cookie jars. Warhol's town house on the Upper East Side, which Johnson had found for the artist, became his design school.

Warhol led Johnson to such important clients as collectors Sandra Brant and Peter Brant, Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall, Barbra Streisand and Richard Gere, though Johnson and his partner, architect Alan Wanzenberg, worked for numerous lesser-known people as well. What Johnson and Wanzenberg's clients had in common was a desire to feel connected to the great designs of the past without being confined by them. Johnson's rooms were never excessive. They had air and space, and a sense of freshness. He loved luxury, but he considered excess to be a form of vulgarity. He was a natural editor, and he edited himself best of all.

Johnson—who died in the crash of TWA Flight 800 in 1996, at the age of forty-seven—had the eye of a connoisseur and the compositional gift of an artist. His rooms were assemblages of splendid pieces, set in sensual wholes. He was as interested in fabric and texture as in mass and shape, which is why he could hang a Cy Twombly painting on eighteenth-century Chinese wallpaper or a Venetian-glass chandelier next to a huge nineteenth-century Irish scagliola urn. It was not the cleverness of the combination that intrigued Johnson; it was the way the shapes and the textures played off each other. So, too, with the mix of furniture by Jacques-Emile Ruhlmann and Jean-Michel Frank, walls of satinwood and handwoven silk, and paintings by Picasso, Léger, Klee, Miró and Bacon that Johnson assembled for an apartmenton Fifth Avenue in such a way that the residence emanated not only elegance but genuine warmth.

Like those unusual people who seem able to communicate with animals, Johnson seemed always to be able to hear the objects that he loved speak. He himself spoke quietly—perhaps the better to listen to them—and he always said he would rather be known for his work than for anything he said.