NEW YORK, United States — Billy Cotton was
in his 20s, newly arrived in Manhattan in the early 2000s and coasting on a
cocktail of youthful exuberance, weed, and amphetamines, when a fire consumed
his apartment in
Chelsea, and with it, his sense of a future.
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The blaze had confirmed his worst fears. “I’d always
thought on some level that my life would fall apart,” Cotton said.
Slowly he picked up the pieces, settling in a series
of makeshift quarters and relying on grit to pull through. But he could hardly
have envisioned the way his life would take shape.
Cleareyed these days, Cotton, now 40, has emerged as
a highly sought-after interior designer, with an enviable client list of art-world
luminaries, Cindy Sherman, Mirabelle Marden, and Lisa Yuskavage among them.
“I’m an artist, but I also think that he’s an
artist,” said Yuskavage, whose
Manhattan apartment he turned into a
gray-on-gray haven, a restful backdrop for her art collection. “Billy is a
teacher of a sort to me. He’s changed me so that I’m much more attuned to
quality.”
On a recent Monday, Cotton was sitting in his
white-lacquered studio on West 26th Street, the space punctuated with Eames
chairs, an Italian marquetry desk, and vibrantly colorful artworks by friends,
and reminisced about his zigzagging ascent. He had a string of odd jobs before
arriving at a high point in what he considers a journey of self-discovery.
Well regarded for his uncontrived, discreetly
subversive aesthetic, his style can veer from homespun (think cottagecore with
a Ralph Lauren sheen) to coolly austere with strategic bursts of color. “I
don’t have a style,” he likes to insist. Nor would he think to impose one.
He tackles each new project “with the fastidiousness
of a Method actor, aligning his approach with the particular emotional
motivations of his clients,” journalist Mayer Rus writes in “Billy Cotton:
Interior & Design Work,” Cotton’s first monograph, published by Rizzoli in
March.
He relates to those clients, real or imagined, in a
visceral way. He dreamed up, for example, a well-born lady, genteelly gone to
seed, a fusion of Miss Havisham and a woeful Jean Rhys character, whose bedroom
Cotton conjured for the Kips Bay Decorator Show House in 2017.
He provided her with a back story, writing, “As with
most of us, some of her hardship was self-inflicted, and some encroached upon
her at the cruel insistence of the world.” Her refuge at the top floor of an
SRO retained the remnants of her racy, haute bohemian past: chinoiserie
wallpaper, a skeletal four-poster bed, and a leopard-print rug.
Rus refers in the monograph to Cotton’s “career-long
proclivity for exploding clichés and artificial boundaries — between past and
present, high and low, intellectual engagement and visceral sensation,” his
eclecticism a legacy of his upbringing.
The designer grew up in Burlington, Vermont, his
mother an Irish Catholic psychotherapist with a predilection for old china and
handed-down furnishings. His father, a forensic psychiatrist and
second-generation Baltic Jewish immigrant, was more keenly drawn to the
clean-lined midcentury spareness meant to obliterate the darkness of his
European past.
Opportunities at home were limited. “There were no
decorators in Burlington, Vermont, or very few,” Cotton said. He initially
considered becoming an art historian but abandoned that notion to take up
industrial design at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. He had by that time
cultivated a circle of friends that included artists Jack Pierson, Mark Flood,
and Paul Lee.
About a decade ago, one of those people, singer and
songwriter Jenni Muldaur, asked him to decorate her summer house in Springs, a
hamlet just north of East Hampton, lodging him in an unused shed and paying him
$9,000, a vast sum to him at the time. He improvised, using curtains made from
dead-stock fabric panels and other found items, and added as a focal piece, a
driftwood chandelier.
Cindy Sherman visited and was captivated. A year
later she commissioned him to design her own home, an 1830s farmhouse also in
Springs, in a high-bohemian mash-up of 18th- and 19th-century antiques and flea
market finds. He expressed an abiding keenness for contrasting textures with a
medley of vintage textiles, including Moroccan carpets, African indigo clothes,
and Italian tapestries.
Is it difficult for artists to cede creative control
to a decorator? Not necessarily, Cotton said. “At the end of the day, I provide
a service,” he said. “I loved being a waiter, I loved helping people when I
worked in retail. And I learned at Pratt how something works: What is the
proportion, what is the material, what’s the budget for it? All these different
things, I could do on a practical level to help these people.”
There were challenges, of course. “Cindy and I went
to the flea market in Paris together,” he said. “She bought this incredible
giant, multicolored, made-in-Egypt turkey tureen that was the size of a table.
It was one of these things that I would not necessarily have shown her. But one
thing I learned: You do not screw with Miss Sherman’s knickknacks.”
He struck a more muted chord with Yuskavage, who
asked him to accommodate her collections of artworks and furnishings. He
obliged with a gray-on-gray interior restful enough to allow signature furnishings
by Pierre Paul, Achille Castiglioni, and paintings by her husband, Matvey
Levenstein, to shine. “I learn by listening to how somebody wants to live,” he
said.
In early 2020, he shuttered his firm to run Ralph
Lauren Home. “I thought maybe that it would be good to design for the American
family in a less personal sense,” he said.
But frustrated by the longer design process, he left a year
later to rebuild his business. Firmer now in his convictions, he recently
warned a prospective client: “One thing you must know, I’m super intense, I get
super passionate about detail. If you don’t want intensity, I’m not your man.”
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