The World’s Top 10 Interior Designers

September 7, 2018

The World’s Top 10 Interior Designers: Architecture and design are not static professions: styles evolve, technologies advance, challenges propel. The following esteemed interior designers represent a fellowship of trailblazers and standard-bearers whose work is imaginative, intelligent, and inspiring.

VICTORIA HAGAN INTERIORS:

Victoria Hagan has long been respected for the intelligent integration of architecture and interior design. Her design philosophy features a refined use of materials, sophisticated color, and strong silhouettes.

HITCHCOX & STARCK-YOO:

Since 1999, YOO has worked with international developers, designing landmark residential and hotel projects throughout Asia, Australia, Europe, Africa, North and South America and the Middle East.

RICHARD MEIER & PARTNERS ARCHITECTS:

The Pritzker Prize and AIA Gold Medal winner, Citing Bernini and Borromini as influences as well as Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn, the architect is well known for his abstracted, often white, buildings and unrelenting personal design philosophy.

Meier is perhaps the best known of the group for his use of white in his designs, which he believes enhances the qualities of light in space: “Whiteness allows the architectural ideas to be understood most clearly—the difference between opacity and transparency, solid and void, structure and surface,” he explains. “They have greater clarity.”

MARMOL RADZINER:

Marmol Radziner (founded 1989) is a Los Angeles-based design-build practice founded and led by architects Leo Marmol, FAIA and Ron Radziner, FAIA. The firm offers a full range of design services, including architectural design, programming, master planning, historic restoration, landscape design, interior design, and furniture design. Marmol Radziner specializes in residential, restoration, multifamily, commercial, retail, hospitality, educational, and community projects.

ALBERTO PINTO:

Borrowing from various cultural influences from his earliest childhood, Alberto Pinto, an inescapable actor of interior design, has built his works on the interbreeding and mixture of genders from more than baroque to less than bare.

KELLY WEARSTLER:

The New Yorker dubbed her “the presiding grande dame of West Coast interior design,” but Kelly Wearstler is more rock star than matronly personage. Author, blogger, outré fashion plate, branding virtuoso (from sheets to jewelry), and decorator and muse of the Viceroy and Tides hotels—Wearstler cuts a profile as colorful as those of her clients (Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale, among others).

ALAN WANZENBERG:

Authenticity is the defining marker of this New York City architecture and interior-design standout, headed by Alan Wanzenberg. The 25-year-old firm’s stirring residential projects, among them a barnlike shingle-and-stone manor, a country house with a Lutyens-Esque countenance, and a honey-toned apartment with a 1930s Parisian air, are endowed with the heft and solidity that come from traditional materials expertly handled.

EMILY SUMMERS:

Her luxurious yet restrained interiors have won her and her firm the respect of the Southwest’s leading architects, particularly Antoine Predock and Lake | Flato. In the realization of her soulful contemporary style, Summers constantly experiments with new materials and intriguing marriages of texture—a soft wool carpet lapping at the base of a board-molded concrete wall, Venetian plaster alongside plainly finished wood.

JOHN BARMAN INC.

Glamorous Op Art modernity is the specialty of John Barman’s Manhattan interior-design firm, as evidenced in airy high-rise apartments splashed with brightly hued art, textiles, and accessories. (Defining favorites include 20th-century glass, particularly Blenko, and contemporary paintings by such powerhouses as Karen Davie and Ross Bleckner.)

PETER MARINO

“I want to create the illusion—and the reality—of permanence.” These are not Peter Marino’s words; they belong to the late Renzo Mongiardino, one of his biggest influences. But Marino’s work certainly embodies their wisdom. Like the Italian illusionist, Marino believes in the seamless integration of architecture and interiors and also happens to be an aesthetic polymath.