<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"View Slideshow\n\nWhat I wanted most was just to love my environment,\" says Madonna of her apartment in an unassuming brick building on Manhattan's Upper West Side. As conceived and executed by the creative hand of Christopher G. Ciccone, her younger brother and most trusted confidant, the apartment is a low-key yet glamorous sanctuary, a place that allows her, once inside, a temporary escape.\n\nMadonna entrusted her brother with the design of her Los Angeles house (she gave him ten days to do it) and never thought of having anyone else envision and execute the New York space. \"Who could I have more in common with than someone I grew up with?\" Madonna says of her choice of designer. \"We like the same things, from music to what we eat.\" Although Ciccone has no formal art training, he designed the stage sets for the Blonde Ambition tour, which was the setting for the documentary Truth or Dare, and he is an artist in his own right. But he is wholly self-taught in the area of interior design.\n\nCiccone knew early on what he wanted to do. \"I wanted to create a New York apartment. In Los Angeles the living spaces are big, wide open. There are loftlike attributes to them, and also the feeling of living in a penthouse. In New York I wanted to make a space for her that was elegant without being weak, peaceful without being boring. She prefers New York to Los Angeles because when she's here she can relax. There's a city here\u2014you feel you are with people, living with the rest of the world, not confined to an automobile. But it still had to be a place she would feel safe in. Even though there's a view of Central Park, you don't feel exposed to anything.\"\n\nThe apartment, he explains, had originally been three separate units. \"Madonna and Sean [Penn] bought the first apartment\u2014the living room, dining room, a much smaller kitchen and two small bedrooms\u2014maybe five or six years ago,\" he says. \"A second one was purchased after their divorce a couple of years ago, and a third\u2014which constitutes the back sitting room and bath\u2014was acquired six months later when the place had been gutted, which of course made it necessary to change the plans.\"\n\nCiccone made virtually all the major design decisions, talking with Madonna once a week, while architect Stephen Wang, a partner of the New York firm Procter and Wang, carried them out. The style that emerged is a classic early Art D\u00E9co look. Ciccone kept as many original details of the 1915 building as possible, such as moldings and fireplaces, and paid attention to all-new minutiae, including the doorknobs and the color of screws. \"I wanted to stay away from American D\u00E9co and late D\u00E9co,\" he says, \"because I felt this style was easier to live with and would age well.\"\n\nThe main problem was to make the three apartments feel as though they had always been one. Working with Stephen Wang, Ciccone got the effects he wanted, especially in the hallway, a long barrel-vaulted space that runs from the living and dining rooms down to Madonna's bedroom and dressing room at the end of the apartment. \"A hallway is a very important part of a New York apartment,\" says Ciccone. \"If you've got one, it means you have lots of room. It's something grand and should be given a certain amount of elegance. A castle is not a castle without a moat. A New York apartment should have a great hallway.\" There were problems installing the central air conditioning (which Madonna never uses anyway because she prefers open windows) and the lighting, but in this instance Ciccone decided it had to be his way. Says Wang, \"With his artistic background, Christopher has fewer constraints than an architect.\"\n\nThe spaces are breezily cozy rather than sweeping or grand, and the colors subdued, even in the vestibule, where a Picasso-inspired rug is complemented by a Se et Mare chandelier and an 18th-century Irish oval mirror. The living room, where Ciccone left the original molding, is a comfortable amalgam of dark blues, deep purples and some mossy greens. Madonna owns four paintings by Tamara de Lempicka, in which female figures are refracted against deep-colored geometric patterns, and the room reflects that angled elegance. The sofa was made from photos of Coco Chanel's studio; Mondrian inspired bookshelves, designed by Ciccone when the first apartment was purchased, flank a fireplace; and alabaster sconces cast a soft glow over a Steinway baby grand piano.\n\nMadonna\"s art collection, however, is the key to the apartment. Vintage photographs, mostly of female nudes, including works by Andr\u00E9 Kert\u00E9sz, look more like a series of abstract shapes than human figures. A Salvador Dal\u00ED depicts a veiled red heart, somehow fitting for this comfortable yet completely stylized environment. \"I get strength from my art\u2014all the paintings I own are powerful,\" says Madonna. \"As an artist myself, I know what it's like to put your heart and soul into something. You can feel the presence of another person.\"\n\nDarlene Lutz, who for five years has advised Madonna on her art collection (which includes two coveted Frida Kahlo paintings that hang in California) and helped shop for many of her furnishings and objects from Paris to Los Angeles, takes it one step further. \"It's no secret that Madonna is an appropriator of images,\" says Lutz. \"Everything she does tells a story. She takes the narrative out of the art and puts it into her work. When she was collecting de Lempicka, for instance, you could see those forms in the videos, as in the one for Express Yourself. A recent series of portraits of her by Steven Meisel was much like the photographic work by Brassa\u00EF.\" Lutz adds that Madonna's collecting is a learning process. \"She's not big on three-dimensional work, but sometimes I still show it to her. We go constantly to exhibitions and to see collections, and that gives me the opportunity to see how she is looking at things, which changes all the time. I've never gone out with a checklist of artwork from a certain period. That has never been my\u2014or Madonna's\u2014focus.\"\n\nSome of Christopher Ciccone's designs were influenced by the furniture of the lesser known Art D\u00E9co designer Eug\u00E8ne Printz. \"I consider him a grandfather of decorative arts,\" he says. \"He was doing a familiar thing at the time, but always with a twist. His work was never perfectly streamlined.\" One of Printz's signature design motifs\u2014accordion-folded doors (portes ciccord\u00E9on) on cabinets\u2014was adapted by Ciccione for the cabinet doors in the dining room and the head- and footboards of Madonna's bed. \"I didn't like him in his purest form,\" says Ciccone. \"It was too much of one thing, which I feel gets boring. It may be great to look at once, but to continue to reenter a room over and over and not get tired of it\u2026 That's why this apartment is made the way it is.\"\n\nThe kitchen is in direct contrast to the main living areas, a combination of white tile and stainless steel. Although the majority of the apartment was designed by Ciccone, he says the kitchen was the most \"collaborative effort.\" One specific Madonna request: a breakfast nook that was made to resemble a booth in a 1950s diner. Over this booth, however, instead of a jukebox, is a 1927 photograph by Jacques-Henri Lartigue of two women called The Rowe Twins. The space is useful but small, made for intimate gatherings. \"I don't like rooms you never use or that are wasted space,\" says Madonna, \"but I also like a sparseness and a cleanness.\" But, Ciccone adds, \"Madonna doesn't cook much. I think she has a couple of cookbooks, and now and then she makes Rice Krispies treats, but I wanted to give her the option if she wanted to,\" he jokes.\n\nThe same intimacy is true of the dining room across the vestibule. The highly burnished Art D\u00E9co table was one of the first pieces bought by Penn and Madonna. The kitchen was even smaller then, so they ate breakfast there, not wanting to eat standing over the stove.\n\nOff the hallway is a guest bedroom, with a central square of recessed lighting almost tracing the perimeter of the bed, and Madonna's office, where Ciccone devised Indian rosewood shelving and a multifaceted desk that folds open and closed.\n\nTaking center stage in Madonna's bedroom is a king-size bed, with Ciccone's version of Printz's accordion-folded head- and footboards, in front of a series of tied-back draperies. \"The bed is theatrical but subdued, very appropriate to my client,\" says Ciccone, laughing. \"And she wanted yellow in the room, but I didn't exactly want to put lemon on the walls. I wanted something that glowed in a serene way.\" What he found was a shade of yellowish beige that every piece of fabric and every object in the room picks up on and reflects. He devised an oval ceiling light fixture, also inspired by a Printz design, which lights indirectly, softening the room's edges. The six-sided dressing room (\"This is where she hides,\" says Ciccone), which continues the same colors and has the same oval ceiling lighting, features a small vanity table flanked by two closets with built-in drawers because, as her brother explains, \"Madonna doesn't like dressers standing around.\"\n\nOne of the most striking rooms is the bath, where a series of repeating pointed Moorish arches\u2014an appropriated Casbah of sorts\u2014echoes the vaulted hallway. One arched doorway separates the front part of the room where the tub is located from the marble-lined steam shower with a marble seat (\"I think everyone connected with the apartment has tried the shower,\" Ciccone says). The windows, which open with white tassel pulls, are also arched; even the medicine cabinet is a double-doored arch. And everything is covered in white Italian marble with a hint of rose vein, except in the shower, where the vein is a deep gray.\n\nFor the shower, which has a marble frame, Stephen Wang had to figure out how to \"work out a door with a vaulted head and make the hardware work too,\" he points out. \"A frameless shower door and a vault may look simple, but they're not easy to achieve.\" Adds Christopher Ciccone, \"Stephen was great in letting my creativity take precedence. I would submit poor drawings, which would be corrected. I learned a lot from watching him work.\"\n\nMeanwhile, Ciccone can't seem to let go of this job. Like his sister, he is constantly changing, rearranging, adjusting, reinventing. \"I don't think you ever truly finish a job like this,\" he says. \"People's tastes continue to evolve and change. I would be surprised if Madonna was content with this for the next ten years.\" Madonna, of course, knows her own mind about these things. \"We call Christopher the pope because everything has to get his seal of approval,\" she says. \"But I wouldn't say the apartment is one hundred percent finished. I like to change. A new lamp, a piece of art, can transform a room. I reserve the right to do that.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/madonna-article-052007>