While some people view their work as a career, Juan Pablo Molyneux, who cheerfully divides his time between offices in New York City and Paris, with residential projects that take him all over the world, sees interior design as an integral part of his being. “It’s so much a part of my life that it has become a constant in my thoughts and actions,” he explains. When working on a project, he says, he finds he can visualize the result even before he has begun. “It’s as if we designers and architects have read the last page of the novel.”

Getting his clients to share that vision is just one of the challenges he welcomes. Assisted by his staff (20 in New York and eight in Paris), he is currently at work on an ongoing design in Moscow and an “extraordinary” project on a private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands. When he first sees an interior, he says, “I always notice the play of volumes, their relation to one another and also the neatness of the space.” Molyneux, who regards trends as something of a “failure of perfection,” says, “If I design the perfect building with proportion, harmony, historical and contemporary references, there is no trend.” But the designer also believes that new directions in interior design and architecture “always have a lot to do with politics and power. If China, which had such an influence on Europe in the 17th century, opens its doors, we could see a renaissance of Orientalism.”

Juan Pablo Molyneux

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