No one ever accused Orlando Diaz-Azcuy of having swatches on the brain. He is that rarity, a designer with a sense of mission: to endow minimalism with a sense of history's riches.
His work as an architect, a corporate interior designer and furniture maker is a study in design counterpoint, a finely calibrated balance between the austere and the ornate. So where the architecture is simple, his furnishings tend to be ornate. If the surroundings are strongly articulated, the pieces within had best be contemporary and sculptural. It's a simple lesson that resounds with practical applications as more and more people flirt with minimalism's extremes."Diaz-Azcuy is known and respected for his very clear point of view and for his mystique," said Mayer Rus, the editor in chief of Interior Design magazine. (The designer maintains that mystique at his office in San Francisco as well, where all the employees are required to wear white lab coats.) "He designs in a style of minimalism that is very distinctive." It sounds like an oxymoron, but Rus calls it "sumptuous minimalism." Diaz-Azcuy (pronounced DEE-az AS-kwee) was one of the first designers inducted into the magazine's Hall of Fame, in 1989.
"I am dedicated to modernism, but I can appreciate that there is only so far you can go in making a space spare before it becomes empty," the designer said with a Cuban accent that is still strong 35 years after he arrived in Miami, nearly penniless, and headed for architecture school courtesy of the Red Cross.
Diaz-Azcuy's philosophy of counter-point is best observed in his own homes, a 1913 Beaux Arts apartment on San Francisco's Russian Hill, where he lived from 1992 to 1995, and the Mediterranean-style house on the west side of the city where he now resides.
The design of his former home embodied the essence of understatement, with his treatments for the walls, neo-classical moldings, draperies and upholstery running the gamut, as Dorothy Parker might have said, from off-white to beige. Ceilings were lacquered a pristine white, and an off-white wool sisel rug hushed the gleam of ebonized floors. Against this monochromatic stage set, Diaz-Azcuy placed carved and gilded antique furniture - Neopolitan diamond-backed chairs, mirrors with Louis XVI-style garlands, a Gothic Revival chandelier.
This is certainly not the minimalism that the arch-practitioner John Pawson would recognize.
"When the architecture is minimal," Diaz-Azcuy said, "I like to compliment it with unique details and furnishings to make it look more romantic, a little deja vu even. You can also do it just with fabulous textures or color," he added, citing Luis Barragan, the great Mexican architect whose strong hues enlivened his simple volumes.
The apartment left an impression of subdued formality, much like Diaz-Azcuy himself.
In his new house, a 1937 white-brick urban villa, Diaz-Azcuy has come home, in a sense, to the same kind of sparseness that he knew as a child in Cuba - a simplicity born of natural materials and wide interior spaces. The designer has always contended that his Cuban back-ground is not much of an influence, but recently that vehemence has softened. "I always tried to avoid seeing a connection between Cuba and what I was doing," Diaz-Azcuy said. "I was never drawn to Latin America's intricate shapes. But now I realize that the Spanish architecture of my childhood is still very close to me."
The feeling of his new "hacienda," as he calls it, is Mediterranean country, thanks to the tile roof, wide plank floors and exposed wood ceilings, but the location in St. Francis Wood is "a little bit Beverly Hills," he said.
This time around, the designer confronted a place with a strong architectural presence, complete with carved gargoyles from the storage vaults of William Randolph Hearst's gargantuan pile, San Simeon. And his response has been to furnish the place with the simplest and boldest of geometries.
The renovation is still in progress, but already in the dining room, Eero Saarinen's classic oval table, supported by a single oval foot, stands beneath a vaulted ceiling of gray-washed beams.
In the bedroom, under a peaked ceiling with more exposed beams, the bed he designed himself is a simple cube frame in maple wood - no paint, no finish - covered with a 9-foot-square piece of acid-green silk taffeta. "I sized it precisely so that no matter how quickly you toss it on, everything gets covered and it looks good," said Diaz-Azcuy of his two-minute bed-making routine. The frame is six inches larger than the mattress on all sides so that the bed feels like it is floating within a house of its own.
In place of the ornamental balloon draperies of the Russian Hill apartment, Diaz-Azcuy has opted for Roman shades; where privacy is not an issue, he leaves the windows bare to dramatize his 300-degree prospect of the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco Bay.
The centerpiece in the room is a 14-foot-long 26-inch-wide bureau, which he also designed. Sleekness itself, with a subtle wave shape and lacquered purest white, it floats like an iceberg against the honey-colored stained and waxed wood floor. Its face to the room is blank, but to the wall it is all open shelves for clothing, and a built-in desk. On the long bureau sits a collection of geometric zinc shapes used by French art students in the early 19th-century.
Mention of the zinc forms prompts Diaz-Azcuy to soliloquize on accessories: in brief, he prefers antiques to modern ones because they are more likely to be handmade - and, more important, because he thinks a modern room stocked with modern accessories is in danger of looking like a showroom.
Diaz-Azcuy, warming to the subject, said, "I prefer to keep most of them in storage, bringing them out from time to time. I would never have them all out at once on the coffee table."
The Russian Hill apartment, replete with flashes of gold, felt formal in the traditional sense; his present house, with its rustic beams, shares a similar air. It comes not from antiques, however, but from the assured placement of every piece against the rich history of the architecture itself.
"I understand people with children need a looser arrangement," Diaz-Azcuy said, "But for me, each piece of furniture is designed for a specific place.
"Friends say that with my new house I am getting back to my roots," he said, acknowledging the echoes of homes he knew in Cuba, "but I would like it if it were even more pristine," he added with a laugh.