Contrary to what you may have deduced, Annabelle Selldorf is not a senior official at the State Department. Nor an executive at Exxon. She is a 36-year-old, Saab-driving architect who heads up a modest-scale firm in lower Manhattan, which she founded in a corner of her SoHo loft in 1987 when a young married couple on a budget asked her to renovate their Upper West Side kitchen.
Nine years later, Selldorf is well past explaining to clients with Traulsen tastes and Westinghouse wallets the terrible truth about New York City kitchen renovations: $20,000 doesn’t buy much. Nowadays, in fact, she’s less likely to be found along West Eighty-ninth Street in Manhattan than along the Rio del-la Pieta in Venice, where she spent part of last year bringing a Gothic-style palazzo dating back to the twelfth century into the late twentieth century. Or along the Limmatstrasse in Zurich, where, also last year, she transformed the top floor of an early-century brewery into a luminous gallery reminiscent of Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus. Or along St. James’s Gardens in London, where, during yet another part of last year, she revved a nineteenth-century rectory up to Architectural Digest speed.
While such projects might make Selldorf the envy of every architect under 40 in Manhattan, she pays a price for her passport-at-the-ready practice. “Do I have a boyfriend?” she sighs. “What are you trying to do? Reduce me to tears? I don’t even have a houseplant.” Clearly forgetting about Zurich’s epicurean delights, Selldorf adds that “contrary to what people think, it’s not a bit glamorous” to have the kind of life that requires her to switch from English to German to French to Italian, which she effortlessly does. “But what I get out of it is more interesting work. You know, there are only so many opportunities in New York.”
It’s true that the kinds of commissions that young, small firms headed by single women tend to be presented with in Manhattan are shops, apartments, and the occasional addition to a summerhouse in the Hamptons, but Selldorf has done better than most. In SoHo, for example, she is this decade’s answer to 1100 Architect, another downtown firm, which at its high-profile peak in the late eighties counted Ross Bleckner, Eric Fischl, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, and Jacqueline Schnabel among its clients. Like 1100, Selldorf made her name among SoHo’s resident artistic community, designing low-budget galleries and living spaces that might best be described as very clean, very lean, very precise, and very white. Not only does Selldorf amplify the original character of SoHo’s building stock by leaving exposed such vestiges of the neighborhood’s industrial past as iron columns and radiators, but she cleans and sandblasts these humble elements to David Smith perfection. She also likes to specify stainless-steel kitchen fittings, which she buys “off the shelf” at professional restaurant-supply shops on the Bowery—and installs with the same precision she uses to install vintage French walnut cabinetwork on Park Avenue.
