No room for mistakes

Todd Waterbury’s apartment is just perfect. No, really. It’s not simply that his book collection is restricted to titles with black, gray or white bindings, and stacked, jacketless, in neat horizontal rows.

Or that nearly every item here is also either black, gray or white, including the paint on the walls (gray with white trim) and most of the artwork, like a painting by Peter Wegner, Waterbury’s best friend, of a simple font chart from the 1940s showing black type on a white background.

Actually, there’s an even deeper level of “perfect” at work in this large one-bedroom apartment near Central Park South. It’s an underlying order that compels Waterbury to arrange his dining chairs not around his dining table like the rest of us, but in neat stacks on either side of Wegner’s font painting, to match its stack of words.

“And if you stand right here,” said Waterbury as he directed a visitor to what he called the sweet spot of his apartment, a vantage point that took in the stacked books, the stacked type painting and the stacked chairs, as well as the plywood edge of another Wegner painting (or really two paintings, one hung above the other).“If you stand here,” Waterbury continued eagerly, “you can see the wood edge of the paintings, and relate it to the wood of the dining chairs. I really like that.”

By now, it is clear that Waterbury – a creative director and brand consultant who spent 16 years at Wieden (PLUS) Kennedy, the ad agency, before going out on his own two years ago – answers to an aesthetic dog whistle, as he put it, that few can hear. He is a design perfectionist, a curious breed that outfits its habitat not according to style or fashion, but to a set of fastidious inner rules that are usually minimalist in nature, but not always.

Bare and minimum

Some are so fastidious they have no furniture at all, being allergic to the “visual clutter of objects” in particular, as Klaus Biesenbach, director of PS1, the Museum of Modern Art alternative outpost in Queens, likes to say – and to design in general. When he travels, he has a habit of stripping his hotel room of anything that moves (furniture, coloured pillows, desktop accessories) and stuffing it all into the closet.

“I like to reduce everything to its original surface.” For the last five years, Biesenbach has been living in a nearly empty apartment in Seward Park, the former union co-op complex on the Lower East Side. Until recently, the place contained not much more than a mattress and a television. After W magazine published an article on it three years ago, Biesenbach suffered from the blandishments of friends, who kept trying to buy him furniture.. Then last summer, Biesenbach, who was travelling a lot for work, lent his apartment to an artist friend whose studio roof had collapsed during July’s heavy rains. When Biesenbach returned, his home had been altered.

The artist had brought in his own sofa, dining table and chairs, and painted the entire apartment – the walls, that sofa, even the DVD player and the cable box – in white house paint. “He tricked me, and I should have been angry, but I was completely charmed,” Biesenbach said. “He thought I needed to loosen up a bit.” True, the DVD player, the microwave oven and the espresso machine no longer functioned, but that didn’t bother Biesenbach. It was the sofa that grated on him.

“It’s white, so you don’t really see it, like an ice bear in a snow landscape.” Another anti-sofa-ite, the English minimalist architect John Pawson, also had a sofa foisted on him not long ago. Pawson has designed thunderously empty spaces for Calvin Klein, Bohemian monks and, most recently, the new Design Museum in London, and is the author of ‘Minimum,’ the perfectionist’s manifesto. He was notably sofa-free for nearly two decades.

Steve Jobs, perhaps this country’s most notorious perfectionist and furniture aesthete, also disdained the sofa and engaged his wife, Laurene Powell, in years of debate about its purpose, she recalled in a New Yorker article last November.What is it about a sofa that so aggravates a perfectionist? “Corbusier said chairs were architecture and sofas were bourgeois,” John Pawson said.

In psychotherapeutic terms, perfectionism is a personality trait expressed in a spectrum of behaviours that range from adaptive to maladaptive, appearing as an element of obsessive-compulsive disorder, for example. Randy O Frost, a psychology professor at Smith College and an author, with Gail Steketee, of ‘Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things,’ links it to hoarding, itself a behaviour that combines indecisiveness, perfectionism and “an intensive perceptual sensitivity to visual details.”

In clinical settings, “perfectionism has always been presented as a negative,” said Jeff Szymanski, executive director of the International OCD Foundation in Boston, and the author of ‘The Perfectionist’s Handbook: Take Risks, Invite Criticism, and Make the Most of Your Mistakes.’Szymanski has used his own perfectionism wisely. He does have 23 clean white canvas binders in his office that are arrayed like soldiers on a shelf, but he can see beyond them (and tell you what is in every single one).

David Mann, a Manhattan architect who once referred to radiators as “wall acne,” is another example: a lapsed or reformed perfectionist.

He lives in a 450-square-foot studio apartment on the roof of a building on East 10th Street, a room that once sported Mylar-padded walls, Lucite shelves and a staggering array of knickknacks, the effluvia of the previous tenant.