When you design someone's house, it's actually painful. I never say, "This house will be a total reflection of you and any defects in it will make you look defective." But people do expect their homes to be reflections of themselves. So what I say is, "Just pretend this is your eighth home. By then you won't care."

Peter Marino

Categorized in : People Home Reflection

I like the fact that I like to think out-of-the-box. Thinking out-of-the-box goes along with dressing out-of-the-box and living out-of-the-box. If you want to come up with a really original design idea and you want to capture a whole new design direction, perhaps the best way to arrive at that is not by acting and thinking and doing like everybody else. That's all.

Peter Marino

design acting thinking

I loathe when architects only analyze architecture in intellectual, nonvisual ways. I really love direct response, and that's very pop. I don't want to discuss abstract transparencies with a bunch of kooks.

Peter Marino

abstract architecture intellectual

I like my clients. All of my clients say, "Peter. You're talented. But, your best virtue is your discretion." They really don't want to be talked about.

Peter Marino

discretion virtue

When you're 20, you think the whole world is talented, but whenyou get older, you realize the opposite is true.

Peter Marino

realizing world thinking

After the motorcycle trips I take for one or two weeks, I have trouble getting back into a car, because I feel claustrophobic with all of that metal around me, and I can't see anything. I feel seriously dangerous in a car after riding on a bike, because your field of vision is so closed in. And then I think about all these little bourgeois people driving around in their cars - it's actually hideous. It cramps you on the head, it cramps you on the side, it puts you in a box on wheels... It's a terrible experience. Motorcycles are about opening the field of vision.

Peter Marino

car people thinking

I wanted to be an artist, because it's a much better scam than being an architect.

Peter Marino

architect artist

People's first homes are always disasters. It's like the first time you have sex. It's never as good as later on. It always gets better.

Peter Marino

disaster get-better home

The older I get, the less I negotiate. When you first start out, it's 90 percent negotiation and 10 percent suggestion. When you get to a certain point, those figures reverse.

Peter Marino

negotiation

I always want to encourage young artists. As the budgets get smaller, that might provide an opening for younger artists and more experimentation. Budgets had gotten quite large for art, as they had for architecture. I'm not going to cut back. The minute someone walks through my door, I go, "That's my thing and you got to let me do it."

Peter Marino

architecture cutting art

Throughout history, from Abyssinians and Greeks onward, artists, sculptors, and architects have worked together. I find this post - World War II thing, this segmentation of the arts, so lame. It's the laming of the arts.

Peter Marino

greek war art

Anytime I see an unusual combination of colors or patterns or texture, I buy it.

Peter Marino

i-see see colors patterns

Creating work for the time that one lives in means no retro thinking. It can and hopefully does mean timelessness.

Peter Marino

retro work time thinking

I've benefited enormously from an arts education and a music education in New York. When they cut the programs for funding, I was devastated.

Peter Marino

new music new-york education

All bronzes are made to be touched. Bronze is a sensual 'living' material. The sweat and oil of your palms adds to the patination.

Peter Marino

your living sweat oil

Nine out of nine architects start with a sketch, and then they say, 'What should we make it out of?' I start from the bottom up - what should it be made out of - and then I worry about what should it look like. The material, the color of the material, the way it feels, and the way you respond to it is every bit as valid as the form or the shape.

Peter Marino

look you color way

When I opened Chanel in London, they were happy. People would go, 'Oh, I just came in to see it. It's so beautiful.' And you leave with a positive attitude toward the brand. Now, you don't really get that online. You don't go, like, 'Wow.'

Peter Marino

you attitude positive beautiful

I like more the fact that I like to think out of the box. Thinking out of the box goes along with dressing out of the box and living out of the box.

Peter Marino

dressing think living thinking

Motorcycle garb is the way I looked to Warhol. Then came the Armani suits.

Peter Marino

then motorcycle suits way

The Peninsula - it's a combination of great service and good design.

Peter Marino

great good service design

What frustrates me is florists who put everything at the same size on the table. I like it when there's mountains and valleys.

Peter Marino

mountains everything like me