Peter Marino is the principal of Peter Marino Architect PLLC, an internationally acclaimed architecture, planning and design firm founded in 1978 and based in New York city, however with several offices around US, like Philadelphia, Miami and so on. Marino’s Design contributions in the worldwide, emphasizing materialiy, texture, scale light and the constant dialogue between interior and exterior. He is widely known for his residential and retail designs for the most iconic names in the fashion and art worlds. Notable and recently completed retail projects include Ermemegildo Zegna flagships in Paris, Milan, New York, Tokyo and Shangai; Chanel boutiques in Paris, New York and Singapore and so much more! Also notable hospitality projects including the Yacht Club Costa Smeralda in Sardina, and Four Seasons Resort in Santa Barbara. Currently Peter Marino is designing numerous private residences aournd the world, including London, Paris and Palm Beach.
Biography : The man before the myth
Marino has been an architect for a long time—ever since he graduated from Cornell’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning in 1971. But it’s never been quite like this: Marino has become the No. 1 designer of the luxury landscape, the man who best understands how to move a customer on any continent through salons full of leather and lipstick and straight to the register. He knows how to work for any number of competitors—walk down 57th Street near Fifth Avenue: That’s Marino’s Vuitton, Marino’s Chanel, Marino’s Christian Dior—while keeping the brand identities intact and the sales figures brisk. Luxury, after all, has had a banner year despite absolutely everything else, and Marino is delighted. “Using ‘the Pedro’ produces very large profits,” says Marino, referring to himself, wagging a finger that is covered, like all the rest of his fingers, in an enormous silver ring. He agrees that luxury is on fire these days, and, he says, “I feel very much a part of that growth“.
Marino is an unusual high-fashion creature in ways beyond the codpiece. He has three distinct ways of speaking: There is the default speech, which bears traces of his native Queens accent (he had a childhood coach to lose it, but sometimes it’s there) and in which most sentences begin and/or end with an enthusiastic dude. Fucking is a top adjective. And then there’s the whole third-person thing, or “the Pedro,” which he adopted after an article in a Spanish magazine referred to him as Pedro el Grande, Peter the Great. That he’ll use in a variety of contexts, like when giving a tour of the Chanel boutique in Soho, where he curls up on a leather banquette in the dressing room and purrs, “The Pedro loves leather,” or when he is asked if he wears Chanel’s newest men’s fragrance and he answers, “Fragrance is not allowed in the clubs where the Pedro goes.”
Background and Realizations: Best Projects
Situated on the ground floor of a late 19th-century building, the new dior store features an interior design by Peter Marino. The retail setting may take glamorous cues from the brand’s iconic mothership on avenue Montaigne in Paris, but retains much of the buildings original elements, albeit luxed up and adapted to Marino’s highly modern design scheme.
The Most Iconic Projects – Chanel’s New Boston Boutique
Coco Chanel’s Paris apartment figures prominently in her legendary brand’s history. Located in the same rue Cambon building as the designer’s couture salon and atelier, the flat was an exotic retreat filled with artwork by friends like Jacques Lipchitz and Salvador Dalí, as well as furnishings and objets that featured some of the enduring motifs identified with her namesake label: the iron double C’s and 5’s that graced a crystal chandelier, the inlaid camellias on a set of 18th-century Coromandel screens. See the splendid interiors designed by Peter Marino below.
Interesting Facts about Peter Marino – “Live to ride and ride to live, dude!”
When the Elevators open onto the 36th floor at Peter Marino Architect, the first things visible are multiple Damien Hirst dot paintings and a stainless-steel skull with bullets for teeth by Joel Morrison. There are also several massive black-and-white photographs of the principal of the firm, Marino himself, standing always with legs slightly apart and a black leather policeman’s cap pulled over his eyes, looking like a cross between a Hells Angel and Karl Lagerfeld. By the reception desk, there is a Han Dynasty horse carved from an enormous block of sandy stone, and there is one wall of Andy Warhol lithographs in bright, saturated colors—and there has also been delivery of a gleaming new KTM motorcycle. The next morning Marino will leave for a ten-day motorcycle trip across the American West. “Live to ride and ride to live, dude!” Marino says. He is 62 years old and has a trim, jet-black Mohawk and goatee. He is wearing a sleeveless leather top that is open on the sides except for three straps secured by shiny silver buckles, a pair of low-rise leather pants that lace up the backside, a snug leather codpiece, and leather motorcycle boots that cause him to walk with his legs open in a V, just like in the pictures. “This is my summer leather,” he says and raises his bare, tattooed arms to the sky, showing a thick strip of muscly midriff. “Air conditioning!”
He is looking forward to this break for the chance to stare, for hours on end, at a white line on a black highway. Sometimes, when he is riding, he plays Wagner’s entire “Ring” cycle through in his head. After his ride, he’ll go straight to Paris for the opening of the Louis Vuitton boutique he’s just redesigned, and then he’ll go to Beirut to check in on a luxury-condominium and hotel complex he’s been working on for the past year and a half. After Beirut comes Shanghai, where he’ll attend the opening of the company’s largest store ever—the largest store he’s ever designed. “I’m like a sleep-hibernation camel, dude,” Marino says. “I’ll go on four hours a night for a while and then I’ll come home and be asleep for 72 hours straight.”
Inspiration Quotes by Peter Marino
“Don’t you hate TV when people are supposed to be talking to one another? Television puts up a wall between people.”
“If beer loses its relevance, it’s because the industry got outmarketed by the wine and spirits industries, not because beer suddenly lost its appeal to the human palate, … Beer has been around for 6,000-plus years, and it will be around for a long, long time“
“This is about beer grown up. This is about tapping into mainstream sophistication, and that will resonate equally with men and women.”
Talent is an Heritage
If Marino’s personal style is specific and indelible, his architecture and interiors are much harder to pin down. Marino’s boutiques do not instantly assault with their “Marino-ness”. Like NY Mag wrote, inside a Marino space, it’s all smooth-moving luxury, where drawers and doors close in perfect silence, and the elevator button is weirdly satisfying to push. They are well and flatteringly lit and, like Marino’s office, full of eclectic collections of art. They feel rich and full and calm.
Marino’s most important aesthetic motivation may be his claustrophobia. “Dude,” he says, “I can’t even take a shower.” Marino lives in a colossal apartment on the far eastern side of 57th Street. Because of his claustrophobia, Marino’s first mission with any space is to open it up and access all available natural light. “Ask any woman,” he says. “I asked my wife. She has a very humanistic take on things, and she’s like, ‘You need light.’ Look, I believe that women would crawl across broken glass to get a cool pair of shoes. But if you want to have a nice time, you need natural light.
“Nine out of nine architects start with a sketch and then they say, ‘What should we make it out of?’ ” Marino says. “I start from the bottom up, what should it be made out of, and then I worry about what should it look like. The material, the color of the material, the way it feels, and the way you respond to it is every bit as valid as the form or the shape.”
