Inside Fernando Sanchez’s Home in the Osborne

Scenes From a Classic Fourteen

(Photo: Dean Kaufman)

The Study
1. The Colors
Sanchez chose “very natural, Mediterranean colors, the color of antiquity. And the houses in the Mediterranean are bordered in white and the blue sky.”

2. The Wall Decoration
The plates surrounding the Venetian mirror are Delft and belonged to Sanchez’s mother. They had a more formal life—displayed on stands—in his childhood home. Below them are some “knickknacks,” like a seventeenth-century Christ in ivory.

3. The Krishna
The Hindu god sits on a Moroccan table from the forties, which “looks very Colonial to me.”

4. The Bookcase
The pyramid shelving system was made by Alexis de la Falaise, son of Maxime and brother of Loulou, and is a masterpiece of mathematics and engineering, at least according to other architects who have seen it. There is an Indian god on top, a gift. “It seemed to ﬁt perfectly well there. I worship this pyramid. Besides the beauty of it, it has sentimental relations.”

5. His Floor Library
Sanchez has reading binges: “I go through historical trips, certain periods of time, and then I go through a jewelry trip and so I have every book on jewelry I can ﬁnd. Then I have a Diaghilev-Nijinsky-Cocteau corner. It depends where the head is.” When not reading in his apartment, Sanchez likes the fact that a walk through its more than 5,000 square feet can double as exercise.

6. The Sleigh Bed
It’s from Jacques Grange and is a copy of an eighteenth-century-style bed done for Florence Gould by Jean-Michel Frank.