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"A few years ago, self-proclaimed &amp;quot;potter&amp;quot; (now design mogul) Jonathan Adler took his partner, Simon Doonan (the writer, trendsetter and creative director of Barneys), to Palm Beach as a birthday treat. They went on a lark, with low expectations, but they were happily surprised. &amp;quot;Palm Beach sounded so old and fussy\u2014and it is\u2014but it&amp;#039;s also young and fabulous,&amp;quot; says Adler, the man who wrote &amp;quot;I believe design should look old and new at the same time&amp;quot; in his book, My Prescription for Anti-Depressive Living, his guide to life in the lane between kitsch and &amp;quot;kultcha.&amp;quot; A friend told them to go look at a 1970s beachfront condominium tower, which they dutifully did. They saw an apartment, and\u2014&amp;quot;Voil\u00E0!&amp;quot; says Adler\u2014they bought it.  &amp;quot;We fell in love with the architecture,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s sort of brutalist modern but slightly organic, with a decorative element.&amp;quot; The building sits right on the beach. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s right there, totally direct,&amp;quot; Adler says. The men began spending part of the winter here, weeks at a time. Eventually they &amp;quot;traded up,&amp;quot; moving down the hall and closer to the ocean, to a two-bedroom apartment. If a city getaway is a pied-\u00E0-terre, this is Adler and Doonan&amp;#039;s pied-\u00E0-plage, a seaside retreat that is infused with color and light, sophisticated yet devotedly witty, sassy but satisfying, a perfect Doonadler collage. Of course, the place is furnished primarily\u2014though not entirely\u2014with chairs, sofas, tables, lamps, ceramics, glass and rugs created by Adler, who is also known as the head judge on Bravo&amp;#039;s Top Design. &amp;quot;I make stuff,&amp;quot; the down-to-earth Adler says in what may be\u2014considering the wide furniture and decorative-arts reach of his eponymous company\u2014the understatement of the year. Their 1,600-square-foot apartment needed very little work. &amp;quot;We tried to make it more modern,&amp;quot; says Adler, who grew up in a highly contemporary home in rural New Jersey. &amp;quot;We painted it white and took down the crown moldings, but mostly we kept it as it was.&amp;quot; A previous owner had installed pale limestone flooring, which was fine with them: It&amp;#039;s visually minimal, and cool and smooth on bare feet. Adler and Doonan, a Brit by birth, added a vintage room divider\u2014fabricated from outdoor gates\u2014to separate the dining area from the living spaces (and hung two translucent polycarbonate Philippe Starck mirrors on it, back to back, one in yellow, one in green). They added white drapes and placed the furniture strategically. &amp;quot;I wanted the furniture to be floating in the middle of the room,&amp;quot; says Adler. &amp;quot;I like everything to be airy and floaty, not lugubrious.&amp;quot; In fact, both men are prodigiously adept at display: Doonan&amp;#039;s surrealistic holiday windows for the flagship Barneys in Manhattan are an international design destination.  The living room is divided into three zones, the entry and two seating areas. Passing through the foyer, you encounter a seating arrangement that includes a pair of Pedro Friedeberg&amp;#039;s famously surreal chairs in the shape of hands. A double-sided custom Adler sofa is set here &amp;quot;at a jaunty angle,&amp;quot; Adler notes. Pillows (all of his design) are carefully placed, as are pots, vessels and other ceramics. Adler likes color and uses his own lacquered nesting tables and other objects in citrus tones &amp;quot;like punctuation marks,&amp;quot; he says.  Another tenet of the Jonathan Adler manifesto states, &amp;quot;I believe in mixing periods: Saarinen chairs in a French chateau, Louis XVI armoires in a futuristic pad.&amp;quot; And clearly he hasn&amp;#039;t shied away from mixing freely here, even including a Saarinen table. But the Adler mix is not random. Certain Adleresque shapes, patterns, colors and themes recur. The tailored curves of tightly upholstered, architectural midcentury furniture appeal to him (he grew up climbing on chairs by Bertoia, for example), as do certain decorative patterns, from stylized lions&amp;#039; manes of ancient Asia to &amp;#039;70s pop supergraphics. There are lots of animals (mostly his own) and bright colors, but he&amp;#039;s kept the palette narrowed by and large to tropical fruits, from pale lemon to blood orange, persimmon and pomegranate, with touches of Caribbean blue. Design, Adler believes, should make you happy; good design can actually make you feel well. A sun motif\u2014the objects are from Adler&amp;#039;s Utopia collection\u2014runs throughout the apartment to help symbolize the spirit of the place. When they are there, Adler and Doonan devote their life to the sun\u2014 and the beach, where they spend most of their time (with Liberace). &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re in and out of the water at least ten times a day,&amp;quot; says Adler. &amp;quot;People think of Palm Beach as snobby and social, and it is,&amp;quot; he adds, &amp;quot;but the great thing is that it is also quite quiet and rustic. The beach is almost always empty.&amp;quot; For a farther-inland activity, they prowl the &amp;quot;antiques row&amp;quot; of West Dixie Highway in West Palm Beach. &amp;quot;It is fantastic sport,&amp;quot; Adler says. Though the apartment is certainly in keeping with Adler&amp;#039;s midcentury aesthetic, which is popular all over the world, it&amp;#039;s also specific to Palm Beach. Call it a cheeky (if not downright irreverent) homage. Two enormous leonine foo dogs face each other across a bench on a terrace. They look like remnants of Beijing&amp;#039;s Forbidden City and would be right at home at the portico of a local maxi-mansion. &amp;quot;They&amp;#039;re a riff on the grandeur of Palm Beach,&amp;quot; says Adler, &amp;quot;but only in a funny way,&amp;quot; because these sentinel Lions of Fo are made of fiberglass, not ancient cement, and were bought in New York City&amp;#039;s Chinatown. Likewise, an outsize concrete monkey\u2014or is it an ape?\u2014sits atop what would have been a ladies&amp;#039; vanity in the bathroom. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a moment,&amp;quot; laughs Adler. Adler and Doonan wanted the apartment to reflect the freedom of spirit they feel while in residence; thus they sought what they term &amp;quot;an improvisational quality&amp;quot; in the way the rooms are arranged. In their &amp;quot;television area&amp;quot; (no aggrandized &amp;quot;media room&amp;quot; here), one wall is given over to a free-form assemblage of Adler&amp;#039;s teardrop ceramic tiles. In the dining room, it&amp;#039;s not really clear if two Philippe Starck mirrors hang on the screen or one -- or, for that matter, what color they really are. That enigmatic effect is purposeful in an apartment intended as a getaway from the workaday world, a place where you&amp;#039;re overdressed if you&amp;#039;re not barefoot. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s a dreamy, fantastical quality to it all,&amp;quot; says Adler, who is clearly quite at home in this shared world of his own making.  What the Pros Know &amp;quot;What&amp;#039;s exciting about design now is that we&amp;#039;re living in an anything-goes world,&amp;quot; enthuses Jonathan Adler. &amp;quot; &amp;#039;Eclecticism,&amp;#039; the buzzword for the past few years, is too weak a word to describe the amped-up style du jour. I prefer the term &amp;#039;aggressive incongruity.&amp;#039; To make an impression and feel new, visual juxtapositions need to be almost jarring.&amp;quot; Adler&amp;#039;s aesthetic may be a bit too extreme for many, but it&amp;#039;s clear that this designer, who terms himself a maximalist, knows what he likes: combining styles &amp;quot;with abandon and a sense of fun. Maximalism,&amp;quot; he says, &amp;quot;is life-affirming; minimalism is gloomy. We&amp;#039;re only here for a short time, and I want to look back at my life and remember the fun of a powder room wallpapered in a lime-green brocade, the excess of a giant vase filled with hundreds of peacock feathers, or the zest of an orange lacquer cocktail table. It&amp;#039;s the over-the-top things that stay with us and mean something.&amp;quot; Happily, both men share this quintessential joie de vivre. Click here to see the resources. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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