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May 2005
Times-Picayune
By Karen Taylor Gist, Associate InsideOut editor
A plump wheat-beige couch and matching love seat anchor the living area in artist James Michalopoulos ’ Faubourg Marigny home. Once you look past that field of calm, however, colors start to swirl and roar, with a geometry book’s worth of shapes caught up in the flurry and flung onto walls and floors and tables and doors as dots and cubes and jigsaw pieces and lilting rectangles, and it’s quickly clear that you aren’t in Kansas anymore.
In this arty Oz, open to the public Sunday for the Marigny Improvement Association home tour, rubber balls are displayed on stands, like sculpture. Hurricane fence doubles as stair railing, and in one bathroom, you must kneel to wash your hands. Kitchen cabinet fronts and bathroom walls are blank slates for Michalopoulos ’ doodles.
It’s Peewee’s Playhouse with Architectural Digest bones, a comfortable, well-designed living and studio space for an artist with a penchant for whimsy and an architect for a father.
"What I’m ruled by is the rule of fun. Is it interesting? Is it lively? Does it please me?" said Michalopoulos , best known for his expressionistic paintings of New Orleans buildings set askew.
"Lively" is a word that pops up often in his description of the home. The downstairs bathroom illustrates what is perhaps the classic Michalopoulos mix of funk and high design.
The shower wall is covered in squiggles of acrylic paint, left over from his work in the studio at the front of the building.
"The bathroom evolves. It’s a living painting," said Jennifer Blow, director of Michalopoulos ’ gallery on Bienville Street. "Every time I come in there’s something new."
The mundane is turned on its ear at every opportunity: To hold toilet paper, Michalopoulos filled black work gloves with cement, then anchored wrists to the wall so that fingers and upturned palms could balance a large plaster bone, which runs through the roll. The look is light industrial meets Addams Family.
The shower door, though, is an industrial chic artwork, alternating thick horizontal strips of sheet metal, punched with tiny holes to give it a rough, irregular texture, and strips of translucent plastic with symmetrical waves.
Michalopoulos reworks elements of his home often. "I look at something and I go, ‘That’s boring.’ " He sees the place as "a casual artwork in progress. For me, it’s an ongoing process. That’s what’s exciting.
"I might have a plan but I’m not afraid of modifying it. I’m willing to redo it. There’s a quality here that’s provisional, like I might want to do something different down the road.
"I am capable of premeditated action," he adds with a laugh. Take, for instance, the overall use of space in the building, which he designed with architect Doug Mayo and engineer John Bose.
When Michalopoulos bought the 1878 warehouse 11 years ago, the concrete walls were covered in black tar, and a refrigerator compressor occupied what is now a patio. The ceiling was dropped.
"There was no light. It was like a pit," he said. During renovations, "We called it the Beirut room for a while."
Now, it contains 4,500 square feet of living space. In the open main living area, walls are exposed brick and variations in floor heights and materials define dining and living areas. A low, corrugated-plastic "roof" delineates the kitchen and bar.
A loft study looks over the main room. More sheets of the translucent plastic wall off an adjacent triangular bathroom, with its sloping fun-house roof. At the narrowest end, where a red, church-like kneeler sits in front of the sink and faucet of Michalopoulos ’ design, the ceiling is so low that one must be on his knees to turn on the water.
The master bedroom is upstairs, with exposed beams and nine windows, some tilted or with wacky frames. One set of small, shuttered panes looks down over the study and studio.
Michalopoulos also uses the cave-like guest room on the landing after painting in his studio until the wee hours.
"There’s not too much distinction between my life and work. They co-exist," he said. Some of the home’s features seem to acknowledge that: The patchwork of carpet samples laid every which way on the floors fits his offbeat decorating style, but it’s also practical for a guy who’s likely to drip paint around the house.
His normal day includes a couple of hours working in his studio in the morning, a late lunch, a few hours in his study and then painting again in the late afternoon. Work for Etoile, the French bistro he owns in Covington, is only "sporadically intense," since he doesn’t manage it himself. And his New Orleans Rum business takes up some time. "I’m working on a new label for a new product," a spiced rum, he said.
There’s also his home in France, which he’s renovating.
That’s a lot of irons in the fire, requiring a lot of energy and creativity along with a business sense and the ability to organize.
"Art is a mix of energy and expression, counter-balanced by a sense of order," Michalopoulos said. "You have to push the limits. If you’re too timid, you never know your full potential."
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