Rational Exuberance (continued)
Baroque extravagance is tempered by modernist restraint
Let it be said that the simple "dress" of Dixon's scheme is not all white. The designer practiced great subtlety within a color scheme common to Palm Beach. Rooms glisten with "a watery palette of pale aquas, sea greens and washed turquoises." Those colors appear on fabrics and furnishings, but are also used to define spaces. Dixon breaks up the single ceiling plane extending from the front door through the living and family rooms by creating the palest of blue ovals over the living room and bordering it with a cornice cast from real shells. "I could have done the same thing with a rug," he notes. But it's more subliminal than interrupting the terrazzo floor, which serves to unify the whole house.
Within this watery world, Dixon assembled a diverse menagerie of aquatic life, though with such finesse that "the sea is hidden in plain sight," he says with obvious delight. The designer speaks of décor choices like an old salt from the bounding main of yore. In Dixon's lexicon, the seaweedy pattern of a living room chair and ottoman and the custom fire screen in the master sitting room have a kelp-like "Sargasso Sea effect." The bird figures on the hand-carved living room fireplace (originally from a villa near Lake Como) and the shape of a bed's headboard evoke "cresting waves." And the luxurious bullion fringe on a sofa "has a Portuguese-man-of-war feel."
Dixon has a talent for abstracting concepts and avoiding literal-mindedness. The McGeehins wanted a romantic bedroom, so he made a headboard using an embroidered Bedouin fabric that came from the pantaloons of a Tunisian wedding garment. And so it goes.
The McGeehin house doubtless feels "over the top" to die-hard modernists, yet the machinelike precision of Dixon's approach is something even a Bauhaus believer can appreciate. Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe created spare, rectilinear spaces to showcase materials and carefully edited, finely wrought details. Admittedly, there's an embarrassment of ornamental riches here, but there are understated moments, too. So while it's hard to call the McGeehins' home modernist, it certainly has a contemporary edge.
The master bathroom Dixon designed for Roseann, who owns a fitness club, is a case in point. He enclosed her shower with glass walls that seem to stand without support. He achieved this effect by creating a groove in the ceiling and applying a clear resin epoxy around the base. To avoid water overflow, he says, "we swaled the terrazzo while it was still wet to a lower depression at the drain."
Then again, Mies might have fainted in the powder room. Artist Cathy Jarman encrusted its walls and ceiling with scallop, abalone, cowrie, whelk and oyster shells and sea glass. "We just turned her loose, and she did a great job," Pat enthuses. Dixon added a grotto mirror to enhance the effect. "To me, this is a very couture sort of room," says Dixon by way of explanation, describing the miniature coral reef above the mirror as "a Philip Treacy hat." Liberace no doubt would have loved it. More important, the McGeehins do too.
"When you feel at home the second you walk into a house," says Roseann, "you know the designer has done a wonderful job."
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