By next Tuesday, the Four Seasons Restaurant, once hailed as the world’s most beautiful restaurant will be just a memory. Yesterday, together with a few dozens of design editors, writers, and professionals from New York I have attended the moving and sad preview of the sale of all of its contents. From the stunning bar stools designed by Philips Johnson and Mies, to the jeweled Tulip tables that Eero Saarinen designed in polished bronze, to the glassware by Garth and Ada Louis Huxtable, known as the best-designed glasses of the past century, to the stunning walnut and steels tables, used by the most powerful New Yorkers dined at the famed Grill Room, all of these magnificent icons of design will be finding themselves other homes and will be moved from their home of the past nearly six decades in the Seagram Building. Every New York has his/her own memories of the Four Season Restaurant, but now, it is all coming to an end, when the city will lose its design masterpiece, which has been perceived as the world’s most beautiful and glamorous restaurant. Designed by Philip Johnson in the Seagram Building, this New York seminal interior has not changed its face since the day it opened in 1959. The Four Seasons Restaurant has come to symbolize the International Style in its most luxurious pristine expression. This ambitious temple of Modernism was at the time, the costliest restaurant to have ever been built, and its final cost of $4.5 million in 1959 was said to be greater than the entire cost of the Guggenheim Museum. All images Courtesy of Wright; the pool image at the bottom @ Jennifer Calais Smith.
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