A modern romantic, interior designer Fernando Santangelo takes a rigorously thoughtful approach to color, placement and proportion, while he freely explores the nearly magical way in which inanimate objects – a chair, say, or a painting – can animate and enrich our lives.  Inspired by collages of artist Joseph Cornell, and set designs of Alfred Hitchcock’s films, Mr. Santangelo prizes these masters’ fearlessness in visual juxtaposition and their ability to infuse stillness with action. 

Mr. Santangelo strives to do something similar in his interiors, which are renowned for their seamless blend of past and present, and how they allow natural building materials to manifest their inherently spiritual quality.  Born in Montevideo, Uruguay, where he learned to paint and dreamed of someday becoming an archeologist, Mr. Santangelo moved to New York City in 1982, and continued his art studies.  He also began work for restaurateur and night-life impresario, Eric Goode.  Through the eighties, Mr. Santangelo created a remarkable series of ever-more-elaborate art installations and temporary decors for Mr. Goode’s popular clubs, such as FEZ and M.K.  The exuberant wit of these strangely evocative interiors caught the eye of Andre Balazs, who hired Mr. Santangelo to give a historically-sensitive modernization to the Chateau Marmont Hotel, a 1920’s landmark and Loire Valley fantasy on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles.  The renovated “Chateau” enjoyed tremendous acclaim, thereby creating a new vogue for smaller, boutique hotels, and emboldening Mr. Santangelo to open his own interior design firm in 1995.

Since then, Fernando Santangelo Interiors has done commercial real estate jobs such as The Raleigh Hotel in Miami’s South Beach, and the Lehmann-Maupin Art Gallery in New York City.  Residential projects include the interiors for Mr. Balazs’s loft apartment in Manhattan, as well as his weekend houses in upstate New York, and Shelter Island.  Mr. Santangelo painstakingly updated a 1940 Manhattan townhouse originally designed by William Edmond Lescaze (a pioneer of American modernism) for socialite and philanthropist Sandy Hill, as well as her other houses in Los Olivos, California, St. Thomas, and Alamos, Mexico.  Most recently, he’s completed the New York City apartment and weekend home of Bette Midler. 

Mr. Santangelo’s work appears frequently in the pages of World of Interiors, Interior Design, Elle Decor and The New York Times Magazine.