A notion of colorful opposites appealed to Sherelle Powell. Polarity on a grand scale is what she got–an overwhelmingly ivory living room, an explosively red dining room, one side with a view of Chicago`s most heartwarming mindscape, the other facing Wrigley`s perennial heartbreak.
”Exactly what I wanted. I love it,” says Powell, whose renovated high-rise home off North Lake Shore Drive elevates a sense of the irreconcilable to towering heights.
This is not just a tint of eggshell and a shade of scarlet that cohabit Powell`s lofty abode. Rather, it is like a January snow and July`s heat, each daring the other to trespass beyond an archway that divides the two disparate rooms.
In Powell`s living room, a tone of off-whiteness announced on ivory walls and ceiling echoes in furnishings. Here, in a rectangular space nearly as long and wide as a racquetball court, recline three ivory sofas, flanked by a bone table from Colombia, a desk, two chaise lounges, two walls of ceiling-high bookshelves and wall-to-wall carpeting of the same color. All are custom made. Together, they visually congeal, like white sand on a Jamaican beach, with only a few deliberate bumps and freckles disturbing ivory uniformity.
Vastly different is Powell`s dining room, which fairly explodes in red. Here, after passing beneath the archway, a visitor is bathed in red as deeply as Chicago`s Diamond Jim`s Restaurant in halycon days. From baseboard to ceiling and back down to baseboard, it mushrooms like a fiery cloud, consuming all but the bay window facing Wrigley Field.
Two rooms so drastically different. Why?
”Photographic negatives,” explains Powell, a tall, restless 47-year-old with an eye for opposites.
And something more. ”I wanted drama and warmth. So instead of black and white, it`s ivory and red,” she says, adding, ”red makes the difference more dramatic.”
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A sense of the dramatic, along with opposition, apparently is a key to understanding why this repatriated Chicagoan chose to accent her home the way she did.
Powell, an Evanston native who grew up wanting to be an actress–and eventually finding footlights in a Paris nightclub–talks passionately on subjects as varied as art, friendship, intellectual laziness, sunshine and rocks. So doing, she provides a clear, convincing rationale for rooms of January and July.
”Yes, I have strong opinions on a lot of issues,” says Powell (now a real estate saleswoman), who returned to Chicago in 1983 after living in Paris for 23 years.
Interior designer Janet Schirn says the color scheme in her client`s two- bedroom home is tailored to Powell`s personality. The idea was to keep things simple, she says, letting the condominium`s occupants provide the drama.
”We are totally committed to reflecting our clients in each job,” says Schirn, who orchestrated renovation in two phases. ”In Sherelle`s case, it was easy. She is a person who projects her total personality very quickly and clearly. Personality is not always as evident.”
Schirn saw in Powell a one-time nightclub dancer with two undergraduate literary degrees and a master`s degree in psychology. She saw a woman who grew up with Coca-Cola and matured with Pichon Longueville Comtesse de Lalande
(1953).
As a child, Powell longed to be a theater dress designer, then an actress. ”I could do a credible Elizabeth II. But the reality is that when you`re black and 5 feet 10, opportunities are rare,” laughs Powell, who attended the University of Illinois at Navy Pier for a year after graduation from Evanston Township High School, intent on becoming a professor of English or history.
Then she began exploring the world, first New York for a year, then to Paris, where she lingered. She got a job as a mannequin-dancer in the Lido–a Paris nightclub and popular tourist attraction along the Champs Elysees
–studied French and met a man.
”He loved to write me poetry. I still have it all,” she says of her late husband, Marcel Loichot, a management consultant who owned several businesses, including a surgical clinic and a book distribution firm that Powell now heads.
Ivory and red perhaps make more sense now.
”Because there are such strong aspects of Sherelle`s personality, we wanted to strongly differentiate, to establish strong contrast between living room and dining room. The strongest way to do it is by creating a positive and negative image. The dining room is all dark and all vivid color, the absolute antithesis of the living room in its shell. The dining room pushes and contains as strongly as the living room does the opposite,” Schirn says.
The result is a contemporary design within a 65-year-old high-rise that accommodates the owner`s eclectic array of paintings, French antiques and a stunning collection of crystalline rock.
Adding to the drama is a master bedroom walled in silk panels and smoky, floor-to-ceiling mirrors. There`s a shimmering bathroom set in marble, with an ebony bidet, a black whirlpool bathtub and a spacious shower with six showerheads jutting out in levels from kneecap to neck. Finally, adjoining the explosively red dining room on the west, is a modern kitchen with red St. Charles cabinets, stainless steel counters and a gray rubberized floor reminiscent of airport concourses.
All of it is designed for a woman who enjoys travel, cooking and dreaming in French, and jogging to Diversey Harbor.
”This is my junk. I live in it,” says Powell in her ivory living room, gesturing to a few homey essentials–a 9-iron leaning against a corner wall in the living room, a glass humidor on a shelf, then to a chaise lounge contoured from frequent use to accommodate a tall, rangy woman who smokes cigars, reads Voltaire and listens to Edith Piaf and the ”Super Bowl Shuffle” with apparently equal interest.
”Here,” says Powell, ”here is where I relax at night. I gave up smoking cigarettes 18 years ago. But I told my husband I could never give up my Havanas.”
Powell bought her condo in 1983, a year after her husband was killed in an automobile accident in Paris. Her move back to Chicago warranted a new home that complemented furnishings and antiques collected in her years on the Isle St. Louis.
The one she settled upon on North Lake Shore Drive–indeed, eagerly purchased–was hardly pretty to look at, according to Powell. Age and deterioration had taken its toll. Ceilings and walls were cracked. Plumbing fixtures were as old as the building. Water pressure was lackadaisical and the bathroom was a wreck, she says.
One look out the window, however, and Powell`s reservations evaporated.
”I knew immediately that this would be the place I`d buy. The view is spectacular,” she says. ”Every room on the east side has a window facing Lake Michigan.”
Calling it ”the best natural painting in Chicago,” Powell later would position her bed in the middle of her bedroom to face the rising sun. ”I lie awake mornings watching the sun come up.”
Practically everything inside was destined for hammer and saw, however.
The result is evident the moment a visitor enters Powell`s foyer where a round hole 3 feet in diameter and almost 2 feet thick has been carved into the foyer wall.
”The entry area was dark and oppressive. We wanted to open the immediate entry to the apartment to its spectacular view. The round seemed the best way to do it,” says Schirn, who also used the round as a decorative element at the south end of the living room on the doors of a bookcase cabinet.
That rounded hole in the foyer wall is only an initial piece of evidence in a four-month renovation.
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One the condominium`s east side, facing Lake Michigan, was a living room, three bedrooms and a bathroom. Now there is an enlarged living room, two bedrooms and two bathrooms. On the west side, facing Wrigley Field, was a dining room, kitchen, pantry and maid`s room. All but the maid`s room were slated for extensive remodeling.
Floor-to-ceiling bookcases were constructed in the enlarged living room`s south and west walls. There Powell displays mementoes of world travels, including a Moroccan knife and African statues engreved with salamander designs, twin symbols of water and fertility. An array of stunning agate and septaria reflects morning sunlight from Lake Michigan into a living room otherwise devoid of a rainbow`s spectrum.
At the living room`s north end, a silvery, stainless steel fireplace wall rises from floor to ceiling. Near its base, a glimmering black marble ledge asserts itself like a sliver of coal on an ivory blanket.
The master bedroom was narrowed by 18 inches on one side to accommodate a widening bathroom colored in glittering ebony. The other side was narrowed to accommodate construction of new closets.
”Sherelle has a prodigious amount of clothing that needs to be stored,” Schirn says. ”So we created for her what essentially is a sleeping chamber and dressing area, which is lined with closets.”
Schirn says selection of furnishings was dictated by Powell`s desire to have a contemporary items within a traditional context. ”We also wanted to accommodate her antiques, of which she is fond,” she says.
Many of those antiques remain in Powell`s other home in Paris, where she hopes to maintain a six-month presence.