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Designer Notes For John Saladino, a room with a view is just the beginning. It's what's inside that counts. To walk into a room is to walk into a room—unless you're John Saladino. For the esteemed architectural and interior designer who is known the world over, to walk into a room is like being swallowed into a living painting. T photographs courtesy of sal adino group there IS the color and the reaction to it, the shapes and angles, the textures and placement of objects. There is a historical lens through which Saladino sees—or, better yet, as he describes it, feeds: "History is a well I drink from every day," he says from his home in Santa Barbara, California. He's had an over-forty-year-long career that started very humbly with a small offce space in New York City where he founded the Saladino Group Inc., wondering at that time if the phone would even ring. The 14,000-squarefoot warehouse is a testament to the designer's reach; his intrepid use of light and scale and color in elements of old and new, classic and modern, rough and polished, creates an indelible experience for the senses in a diorama-like living realm. Style by Saladino, published in 2000, is essentially a guidebook of his design principles and how to apply them; 2009's Villa details his lush thirteen-acre Tuscan-style estate in Montecito, California, that he recently sold (the listing price, according to Forbes, was $24.5 million). He also maintains a residence in New York City, where his Saladino Group Inc. and Saladino Furniture Inc., both of which are headed by his son, Graham, are based. He's won numerous awards and accolades for his projects, which have included large-scale high-rise buildings in Manhattan, the private homes of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, dream houses in Palm Beach, palaces in the Middle East, and private island getaways in Greece. Saladino, seventy-three, was born in Kansas City, Missouri, the son of immigrant parents from Sicily. His father was a doctor, and the earliest memories that Saladino has concerning his design affnity is of the dream houses he would draw on the prescription pads from his father's offce when he was four years old. "Some things are just written in the wind," he says. After graduating from Notre Dame and what was then called the Yale School of Art and Architecture, Saladino spent what would be a watershed year in Rome working with a Roman architect. The experience, like the iconic pillars in the ruins of Pompeii, loomed large in his consciousness and design aesthetic from then on. "That had a big infuence on me because it certainly made me fall in love with corroded surfaces and monumental scale," he says. But it's not just in the grandiosity of Europe or palatial estates that he fnds elevation. Beauty and simplicity can be subtle, but just as special as the modest beams of a log cabin. Holding on to the past in classic ways injects his projects—both professional and personal—with a timeless appeal. He doesn't own a cell phone. He uses a pen and paper to keep his lists, , wonders why anyone would choose stainless over sterling silver, and delights in that time-honored and, yes, classic way to spend long, languid evenings: with friends gathered around a sumptuous table for dinner. "history is a well I drink from every day." Spring 2013 . Tempus-Magazine.com 87