Design

October 2003 Vol.1 No.2

* I n s p i r a t i o n s in D e s i g n a n d A r t f o r t h e H o m e

Architecture

Arizona Edition*

Reconsidering the City West By Midwest The Architects Architect Lighting in Home Design

*Miller's of a Newport Beach house involved a close collaboration *Millers interior design of a Newport Beach house involved a close collaboration with California architect Trevor Abramson: The three-bedroom, 3,500 squarethree-bedroom, 3,500 squarefoot home, replicating the shape of a sail, sits snugly on the beach at the harbor entrance to the Balboa Peninsula. Accordingly, Miller's bright, light, yet elegant Millers interior is oriented for a lifestyle of sea, sun, wind, and friends. wind, and friends.

{ writer David M. Brown and photographer Bill Timmerman }

it and exploit the value of true and artful interiors.

David Michael Miller

eartland America is at the heart of David Michael Miller interiors. Add Wright, Sullivan, Adler, Jenney, the prairie, the grassy plains, and the rolling hills of his native Midwest. Add a middle-class Catholic upbringing that nurtured introspection, reliance on higher standards, and honesty. "My background caused me to relate strongly to real imagery rather than simply gravitate toward elements of design that conform to standards of class structure," says Miller, whose firm is one of the most respected in Phoenix indeed, throughout the West and Southwest. "I did not grow up with luxury or very fine things," he explains, "so when I was finally exposed to them they meant something different to me." His simple, elegant and artful interiors manifest this rejection of classicism as well as his well-honed standards of good taste and materials selection. What "fine things" artifacts, art, objects d'art, furnishings, and other details mean in a David Michael Miller Associates (DMMA) design is that they serve as vital, interconnected elements in crisply articulated space: "I am more inclined to step out of the norm when it comes to trends and fashion when used only for fashion's sake."

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or fashion and Used without scrutinygoodrestraint,They trivialize trend are enemies of design.

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"Miller energy is pure and it doesn't miss a detail," says Walter Spitz, owner of Creative Designs in Lighting of Phoenix, a frequent vendor to Miller. "He's got the job figured out from the start and always with his clients' interests in mind." For Miller, designed space, however beautiful to owners and guests or worthy of accolades by peers and press, must ultimately be functional space. It must, for one, be livable for people, not museums, for experiencing, not gawking. It must also evoke an emotional response not be cold but be vibrant and throb with energy: "Architecture and interiors have emotionality; designers should be concerned about how spaces make us feel." Finally, interiors must be streamlined and clean: "I am not a minimalist, but I do like simplicity. David Michael Miller Associates, based in the well-known two-story studio that he and Phoenix architect Wendell Burnette created in Old Town Scottsdale, never forgets these roots and the dedication to interiors that are honest, organic, and true. The connection to the earth is apparent

in Miller's allegiance to organic materials, monochromatic colors, and natural forms: "Wright's romantic writings of the prairie and of nature resonated with me," he recalls, tracing the origins of his design sensibilities. So, although Miller is now one of the most requested luxury-home designers in the West, he has never really left his homespun, formative years in Chicago the heartland of modern American architecture, with its genesis more than a century ago by architects such as Louis Sullivan, Dankmar Adler, William Jenney, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Born in Wisconsin (site of Wright's Taliesin), Miller grew up in Chicago and studied at the Ray College of Design, an arts trade school on the city's "magnificent mile." After completing his education, he worked for a design firm in downtown Chicago but found that its work was antithetical to his view of truthful, unadorned design and the philosophical roots of the Chicago School: clarity, honesty in materials, minimal decoration, decoration that tells in the total design. "I don't like

his clients interests in mind.

Building the Relationship Between Architect and Designer

*David Michael Miller's 1,680-square-foot Scottsdale studio is a collaboration with Phoenix architect Wendell Burnette, who ingeniously placed the tall, narrow building amidst existing structures, parking, and the garden streetscape of First Avenue in downtown Scottsdale.

For Miller, a successful design requires a closely coordinated relationship between its architecture and its interior. Miller is annoyed by the snobbery regularly echoed in architectural halls: that interior designers are not equal participants in the overall building process. In contrast, he feels the relationship between architect and designer should be symbiotic, creating a final work that is vibrant with life and energy. "The best scenario is when the architect and the interior designer work in concert to create continuity, not monotony," Miller says. "Each discipline needs to acknowledge and respect the other." In this ideal dynamic, the project and the client benefit from this hybrid creation.

For Miller, the relationships that facilitate good interiors are represented by a triangle with vertices of architectural context, geographical/cultural influence, and the client's own style and color sensibilities. Similarly, architects and interior designers must work in harmony: "I like interiors that live with the architecture and are fused to it or are another expression of the building itself," he says. Some designers exceed their primary charge to design honestly: They stuff interiors, setting the designed space against the built space by overwhelming it prioritizing the contained space over the container. Conversely, some architects want to do everything including the chairs and the rugs. "Egos," Miller says, "sometimes get in the way." But egos need to meld for an ideal

to get caught up in the whimsical aspects of interior design," he says, "so I strive for honesty and simplicity for interiors that are sensible and sensuously restrained." This truthfulness is central to the Miller metier and morals from overall design to materials selection to business relationships with clients and project participants. "Design," he has written, "does not exist to support the business structure; the business structure exists to support the efforts of design." When he migrated to Arizona, the Frank Lloyd Wright Fellowship at Taliesin West in Scottsdale offered him its prestigious membership (from Mrs. Wright herself), but Miller declined, more intent on setting his own standards rather than on aligning with those of others, however august. Created in 1989, David Michael Miller Associates specializes in residential interior design (in new construction, he prefers to be involved from the conceptual stage of architectural design) as well as custom-furniture design and manufacture. With Miller as the sole designer, the firm includes professional support staff Shelley Behrhorst, purchasing/expediting; Brian Wieberg, CADD and technical support; and Audra Harvey, business and financial administration. The company has been regularly honored by peers, including these recent awards: First Place, American Society of Interior Designers (ASID), Arizona North Chapter; Residential Space Between 3,000and 6,000-square-feet; 2003 First Place, ASID Arizona North Chapter; Residential Space Under 3,000-square feet; and the 2002 Ashley Group Best in Show from the National Design and Architecture Competition. In addition, Miller's work has appeared in a number of books on interior design. Most recently, he was named one of a handful of designers to receive this year's National Design Excellence Award from the National Society of Interior Designers in Washington, D.C. His simple, unadorned, elegant designs have been celebrated nationally and locally in Arizona Foothills, Coastal Living, House Beautiful, Interior Design, Metropolitan Home, Objekt, Phoenix Magazine, Phoenix Home & Garden, Renovation Style, and Sources & Design and The New York Times.

miss a Walter Miller energy is pure and it doesnt the jobdetail, saysfrom theSpitz, and always with Hes got figured out start
project: "Architect and interior designer should have a shared concept from the beginning about what the building is and what the building should express," Miller says. "This is the common ground that is essential for a cohesion between architecture and interiors." This tension and cohesion is the essence and philosophy of the DMMA studio, which has been praised in numerous publications for its innovations. Creative tension resulted in a better product, says Miller, as he and architect Wendell Burnette worked together on, and often battled about, the studio project from its conception. Burnette agrees: "Together we went places we wouldn't have gone independently. It was a great collaboration."

A Study in a Studio

*left: Miller's design for a 5,600 squarefoot Desert Mountain home is a showcase for the owners' collection of 400 wood-block prints by the 19th-century Japanese master Ando Hiroshige and their collection of artifacts from Southeast Asia. Four corridors displaying most of the black-framed prints surround the beckoning entryway courtyard.

*below: Asymmetrically configured

balustrades, white oak treads, and Aaron Fink monoprints highlight the elegant stairway of the Newport Beach house.

o get to the work area where David Michael Miller creates many of his award-winning interiors, you take a tour of the Zenlike studio created by him and architect Wendell Burnette. As Miller describes it, the studio is designed so that "every somewhere is everywhere." Off the reception area, you climb a stairwell, past a thinly cut white Indian-onyx stairway window that draws natural light into the stairwell, then to a half-story landing with artifacts lit by halogen lighting (created by Phoenix' Creative Designs in Lighting), and up to a work area with a thick-planked bookcase that seems to float but that actually serves as an architectural truss. The bookcase, in fact, is the wall - "a friction piece" Burnette has called it. Then, to get to Miller's office on the north side, you trek by the library/conference area across a 30-foot catwalk that Burnette has suspended on stainless-steel cables. The hollow metallic sound of shoes or heels reverberates against the block walls, signaling not so much the instability of the engineering but its floating, detached, and mysterious character - themes of the building. Above, a series of banks containing five halogen pin spots are slit into the ceiling -illuminating your journey as well as individual work areas and artworks Two pieces of artwork - one synthetic, one natural - serve as focal points for the office, where Miller meets with clients at an unobtrusive cast-concrete conference table. Above his subdued whitewashed plank work-area floor, a bright abstract painting by Janis Provisor (an untitled oil and metal leaf on canvas) foregrounds itself against the white drywall backdrop. During the day, the painting is illuminated in two ways: by a floor-height cutout created by Burnette in the eastern wall to infuse natural light and by a northern window-wall that displays the second piece of artwork, a mature mesquite tree that rises from the courtyard, contrasting against the block wall of the studio that extends beyond the window ten yards or so north. Transparency, honesty, comfort, lightness, sunlight-and a venerable mesquite rescued from razing: This is the studio built about, for, and by David Michael Miller, who says, simply, "It makes me feel good.

After meeting with other architects, Miller approached Burnette to design the studio. He liked the way Burnette had used a similarly narrow site in building his modernistic, minimalist studio home, which had appeared in Phoenix Magazine and brought him widespread recognition. To complete the team, Miller chose Construction Zone of Phoenix as the builder, Creative Designs in Lighting for the lighting plan, and Christy Ten Eyck of Ten Eyck Landscape Architects for landscape design. Burnette had primarily worked on public projects with architect William P. Bruder Ltd. in Phoenix from 1985 until opening his firm in 1996. After just a few meetings, it was clear that Burnette often wanted to travel one path, Miller another. "Wendell loves inventions and innovations in his building designs," Miller says. "I saw my studio interiors as more of a passive container. I wanted to edit the building details down and have the building interiors recede in the building's composition." Still, the 1,680-square-foot DMMA studio is a successful collaboration of design disciplines, and the outcome is an innovative container, as it were. Completed in 1999, the building rises on a narrow lot 50 feet wide and 125 feet deep, with an extended offset from the street, which highlights its more horizontal neighboring structures. Burnette has placed it ingeniously amidst existing structures, parking, and the garden streetscape of First Avenue, creating what he describes as "a building carefully placed in a garden as opposed to one set in a parking lot." The north and south extremes of the building are glass walls, bringing in natural light. On the north side, Burnette created a courtyard for the studio, including saving an old mesquite Burnette's "tree from Sleepy Hollow": This courtyard, which also serves as the staff entrance, becomes a focal point for Miller's secondstory office window-wall. Burnette and Miller agreed that 12-inch Integra masonry blocks would form the building skeleton, which runs from the concrete floor to the ceiling on the east and west sides. Within this solid frame, the studio working space seems to fill the building, to float in the masonry shell rather than attach to it. It is, as per Miller's desire, space that seems fluid, that is visually light and luminous, and space that seems capable of evolving, allowing Miller's own professional and creative evolution. At the same time, building tolerances were very precise, as the architectural elements are extremely cohesive, explains DJ Fernandes, project manager for Construc-

*The primacy of art, order, and life permeateds the design of the Desert Mountain home from the first step. At the entryway, owners and guests pass through a 5-foot-by-8foot pivot-action mahogany door. A sisal runner, manufactured by David Michael Miller Associates, welcomes them on finished concrete. A trio of Asian sculptures sits on a console on one side of the room, while a living plant affirms life on the other.

tion Zone on the project. Miller was also attuned to this: "He possesses a keen sensibility of the detailing and compositional quality of the building" Fernandes says. For strength, Burnette reinforced the walls with rebar-like steel rods. On the studio's western wall, he added a series of polished, 12-inch long, one-quarter inchthick Plexiglas plates that sit at random intervals between the vertical joints in the concrete blocks. These plates, especially at varying hours in the afternoon, are prismatic, bringing color and natural light into the studio. In addition, they draw attention to the very essence of the blocks, making them perform as well. This use of basic block affirms Miller's design philosophy: "They are truthful and unveneered. They are what they are." During the first four years, in fact, the force of the wall has extruded the plates, so that their prows from the wall vary. Miller: "We talked about adjusting them back to their original positions, but Wendell and I agreed not to." This materials migration evidences the building's growth. Miller and Burnette disagreed about the reception area on a variety of details including the composition of the partitions between spaces and the work surfaces. For the latter, Burnette wanted a medium-density fiberboard (MDF) with

expressed hardware. Miller said no to the tectonics and the material. He wanted the hardware seen and not heard and he preferred the use of natural white oak to the synthetic fiberboard. "I wanted the surfaces to provide a natural touchstone," he says. "'I wanted them to say, 'This was a tree.'" Burnette also wanted to trowel Venetian plaster on the wall behind the receptionist desk in a brilliant red to highlight it and draw attention to it as a work area. Miller demurred. Always looking to pull back the environment, he declined on Venice and chose the relatively anonymous material of white wallboard. The neutral background of white wallboard allows for three Timothy McDowell panels that appear on the wall: "Anthropomorphic Study," a 1996 encaustic on 3/4" birch; "Ever Serene I," a 1997 bees wax on wood; and "Ever Serene II," also a 1997 bees wax on wood. Creative Designs in Lighting installed halogen accent lighting on the works to further highlight them. This is familiar Miller lighting, Spitz says. "We call it 'burn it dark' or 'slash and run,'" he says, explaining that Miller prefers to hot-spot objects letting the surrounding areas recede into an elegant darkness that contain the objects.

Sailing onto Newport Beach

Miller's design of a Newport Beach house (2000-2002) required a particularly close relationship with Trevor Abramson of Culver City, Calif.-based Abramson Teiger Architects. The three-bedroom, 3,500-square-foot home, built by the Gallo Corporation of Laguna Beach, Calif., on a snug lot at the harbor entrance to the Balboa Peninsula, was designed by Abramson as a billowing sail, following the clients' brief. "The sail form rises to cradle the roof terrace and gave us the opportunity to bring some of the grace from the water into the home," he says. As a result, its flowing structure (including a sail of white mosaic tile that ripples light) involves exterior and interior details such as radiused walls that seem fluid like its environment of sea, wind, and sail. The beach facade is all glass, opening to the beach with large sliding panels almost boatlike in its closeness to the water. "The clients wanted a low-maintenance home that would be light and bright, with infused color," Miller says. "They wanted the space to be carefree and uncluttered." In accordance with Abramson's desire to keep the ceiling clean, much of the lighting in the home is set into the floor with ceiling lighting as unobtrusive as

possible, Spitz says. "It keeps the palette clean," he says. The success of the design is in its simplicity apparent in the computer-controlled lighting system, which minimizes the visual acne of switches. Throughout the home, Miller maintains this cleanliness in his pulled-back detailing and millwork. This is a lifestyle home a place to be enjoyed, not a showplace. As with all Miller interiors, this is a container for life, hence a "receding design": "It's a place for people's experiences." The stairway is particularly well conceived, with its wirebrushed white-oak treads and asymmetrical balustrades: one with thin cables and one with tempered glass. Set against a canted, citrus-colored Venetian-plaster wall, the riserless stairway leads to the landing with two nature-themed monoprints by Aaron Fink - "Blue Grapes" and "Red Berries." Also providing natural contrast is a hand-hewn Mexican Cantara stone container and a living plant. The stairway leads guests and owners to both the pleasures of art and sleep as well as suffused light. A skylight sits above the second-floor one way in which Abramson was able to fill the house with light while complying with the required zoning setbacks. Still another flight ascends to a roof deck with a curving parapet: "It's like the deck of a boat," Abramson says, adding that this deck also includes amenities such as a Jacuzzi, a firepit, and 360-degree views of the marina environment. This same simplicity inspires the cleanedge design of the bedroom interiors: In the master bedroom, Miller provides two headboards: the larger of curving whitemosaic tile and the second of white oak wrapped with simple cotton webbing. Adjoining the tile headboard are nightstands to both sides of the bed: These are in a white satin-lacquer finish over MDF. Here Miller continues a theme of the house: fusing the interiors with some of the furnishings and the architecture itself. Twin sand-toned white ottomans edge the base of the king-size bed. Their powder-coated steel legs sit on wire-brushed 5-inch white-oak planking. As with the interiors throughout, the master bedroom is an uncluttered, elegant space for that best of rest: from the pleasant weariness of sand, sun, family, friends and sailing without leaving shore. In a 2002 new build in north Scottsdale's Desert Mountain, Miller coordinated with Scottsdale-based Rick Daugherty, builder Paul Lovato Homes Inc., also of

East Meets Western Desert Home

Scottsdale, and the home-owners, a retired couple from Manhattan, N.Y., to create a home that exemplifies the close connection between art, architecture, and design. The ASID Arizona North chapter thought so, too, recently awarding it first place for homes from 3,000- to 6,000-square-feet. The 5,600-square-foot, two-level threebedroom home sits on a knoll with unobstructed views of surrounding mountains. The owners wanted the house to showcase their collection of 400 woodblock prints by the 19th-century Japanese master Ando Hiroshige as well as their artifacts from Southeast Asia. "The house is a canvas for the art," Miller says. Following in Eastern tradition, the central courtyard features a koi pond surrounded by four corridors to display most of the block prints, all in simple black frames. Smaller groupings of the prints occur throughout the house. The challenge was the quantity of the block prints, and the gallery was the best way to achieve the display of so many of them. The house reflects a philosophy of order and Zen. The simple grid massing of the prints draws viewers in to the corridor to participate in their art's individual storylines. Many of Hiroshige's print series tell a sequential story. The presentation of this art, as conceived by Miller, allows guest to participate actively in this energy. From this entry courtyard, the success of the project the interconnectedness of art, architecture, and design is particularly evident. Large glass expanses deliver the artwork to even those outside the home expressing the theme of the building from the initial entry to the courtyard. Similarly, natural light from the outside fills the interior space. Colorado sandstone forms the front-entry area: lowkeyed but rugged and unadorned. Phoenix' Creative Designs in Lighting, led by project manager Chris Wild, installed an unobtrusive ceiling system of directional halogen lights to highlight the works. "On this project, David said simply, 'Light the art,'" company owner Walter Spitz says. At the hallway ends are mirrors, which extend and bounce back the effect of the massed woodprints. Miller's design for the corridors and throughout the home makes the artwork central. Colors and finishes are passive, resulting in simplicity, tranquility, and comfort. "I didn't want trickery," he says. "I wanted to subdue the interiors so that their occupants could appreciate the final detail of the art." Floors, for instance, are integrally colored concrete with long runners designed and manufactured by DMMA for textural

Excellence at DMMA

erfectionism and restlessness have been a great driving force in my work," says David Michael Miller. "I always want it to be better." Although different jobs have different criteria for excellence, six concepts are always present for him:

Be Relevant: in the architectural

context in which it is presented, to its users, to the geographical environment in which it lives.

Be Innovative: so that there are

elements that are inventive, original, etc.

Be Rigorous: so the details and Be Evocative: so the interiors

execution of the design are of exceptionally high quality. bring you somewhere or move you in some way, through color, texture, scale, composition, etc. truthful, not a lot of gimmicks, flash, or trend. And,

Be Real so interiors are frank and Be Thrifty so interiors do not

waste impact on too many elements. The interior should spend its elements wisely.

and color contrast as well as comfort. Walls and ceilings are khaki; the fireplace and structural piers are faced with rough Colorado sandstone; and the furnishings are finished or upholstered in khaki, taupe, and ivory. Miller-designed millwork, a console for the entryway, and concrete pedestals by Tempe's Kornegay Design are similarly executed to step back and highlight the artwork. As with all Miller interiors, the design for the home recedes into simple elegance while remaining provocative and evocative: This is the David Michael Miller paradox. "We can't forget that good interior design should create an emotional response," he says. "Interiors are not just to look at, to impress people with. They should make you feel good as living environments. Interiors are spaces to live life."