Only a few days after fashion designer Calvin Klein’s Miami-Dade county waterfront house sold for a little over $13 million, fashion designer Tommy Hilfiger has listed his own in Golden Beach, an exclusive enclave a few miles north of Miami Beach. Hilfiger is asking $27.5 million for the home. Hilfiger and his wife purchased the property in 2013, for $17.25 million.
The Klein and Hilfiger homes are geographically situated in the same neighborhood, but the approach to the interior design of the two houses could not be further from each other. Klein’s former Miami Beach retreat allowed its historical elements and landscape to fully express the property; in that way, it achieved a kind of carefully literal transparency. Ascetic glamour, if you will.
Hilfiger’s, by way of contrast, is extroverted, ebullient, and packed to bursting with playful surfaces. There’s nothing ascetic about this glamour. It comes off with the theatricality of glam-rock—inventive, mercurial, brash, a little manic, and very self-conscious—which would be in keeping with the former record-store owner’s cross-disciplinary interests of fashion, music, and film.
It’s an interesting stylistic collision: competing patterns, colors and textures, materials, artistic references. The Basquiat/Warhols on the dining room and living room walls speak volumes about the desired effect. It’s as if the design team had been delivered this imperative: make a house where acquaintance Warhol would want to party, and not only in the psychedelic media room (psychedelic media not included with sale; the new owners will have to supply their own liquid light show). Mickey Mouse greets all who enter, a mirror-ball makes a discotheque court of a wet bar, and a reading salon has walls dressed in a black and white art-nouveau design.
A 14,075 square-foot MoMA interior, and beachfront, too. A palm-dotted buffer between the house and the ocean, and relaxing Floridian trade-wind lounging provide a bit of soothing outdoor down-time after a long stretch spent within.