When interior designer Joan Behnke brought Bob and Audrey Byers to Paris, one of their first stops was the Grand Palais. The petite, silver-haired Californian marched her new clients, self-made health care multimillionaires, through the great hall’s Monet exhibition, using the painter’s work to engage the couple in a larger discussion about fine art. “You have to bring clients along on a journey,” explains Behnke, a soft-spoken 59-year-old. “It’s about teaching people to appreciate what they are paying for.”
Behnke’s work adorns the homes of some of the planet’s wealthiest people. Her clients pay for six-figure furniture by haute designer Hervé Van der Straeten, weathered antiques pulled from the rickety tables of the Paris Flea Market, rare strains of Carrara marble selected along the steep edges of a Tuscan stone quarry, black lacquered chairs created by artisans in a remote fishing village in Myanmar. More than anything, though, they pay for the stories that come along with these items.
Every fixture, every finish, every decoration positioned inside a Behnke-detailed home comes with an adventure attached. The designer insists that her clients personally play a role in the narrative, whether as an integral part of the sourcing or as a Behnke-educated font of information on what is in their homes. And every step of the journey, from igniting an appreciation for fine art to enabling a client to choose her own bespoke light fixtures at a glassmaker’s studio, contributes to the Behnke brand. It’s an investigative process that may span years and cost anywhere from hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of dollars.
On a recent day we visited the Byers’s newly finished 23,000-square-foot Richard Landry-designed château overlooking Lake Sherwood in tony Thousand Oaks, California.
“I don’t want my clients to just own a personalised piece for the home; I want them to experience it,” Behnke stresses, as we stroll through the mansion. Bob Byers eagerly joins the tour, pointing out a restored antique chandelier found at a Paris street market, reclaimed bricks from Boston’s Big Dig that march along the domed stairwell ceiling, a silky handwoven fabric from Laos that wallpapers the powder room and sliced bottle bottoms that form a gleaming glass collage on the wall of the wine room. The pièce de résistance: The lush black-and-gold home theatre with a glass-panelled strip embedded in the floor to reveal an exotic-car collection in the showroom below.
Behnke first worked on Barrack’s personal residence in Montecito, California. When his private equity firm purchased a 36-mile swath of Sardinia’s Costa Smeralda, he enlisted her to help his wife, Laurel, transform the coast’s hotels into bastions of high luxury. It meant identifying local artisans to create opulent textiles and furnishings. Today the private villas at the Pitrizza and Romazzino hotels (recently sold to Qatar) fetch more than $25,000 a night during the high season, luring business moguls, oligarchs and royals from across the world.
(This story appears in the 29 November, 2013 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)
Well she makes her job with passion
on Nov 25, 2013