Architectural Digest The Professionals Jennifer Post A Modernist Designer with a Penchant for Light and White Interiors by Nicholas von Hoffman April 2006 view magazine photos Jennifer Post seasons her speech with the words that decribe her life and her work. "I'm a purist. Some people don't like what I do. That's fine. There are enough people who do. I want to do something that's completely unconditional and unique for people who appreciate light and space, who want one very fluid, purist scale when they're at home." White would seem to be the designer's only color: She uses it everywhere. "I literally have four white towels in my closet. That's it. White walls are very warm, and white cashmere is just as warm as brown cashmere." Post grew up in Hamilton, Ohio, near Cincinnati. Her father was a chemical company executive who liked to take one of his children along on business trips. Post's siblings were not keen on airports and hotels, so she was delighted to have the chance to explore the major cities of the Inited States. "I had this incredible urge to travel." she says. "That's probably why I'm single, probably why I don't have any children and all I do is work. I love what I do so much that I can't wait to get up in the morning." On those trips with her father, however, she never shopped and never went into stores. "All I wanted to do was walk the streets od San Francisco and Atlanta, Chicago, Boston, St. Louis," And as she walked, she absorbed architecture and design. In Chicago, she recalls "going all the way down and then turning and going back up Lake Shore Drive and doing it again because I loved to see if I could name all the buildings. I do the same thing in New York. I love walking down Park Avenue. I can name call the buildings and all the architects of the buildings." At the University of Fincinnati, where she was already designing, her fellow undergraduates' room gratis, Post decided that she would be a set designer and filmmaker, but this turned out to be an ambition that even such a willful and gifted young woman was not able to realize. Arriving in Los Angeles, she took her 16-millimeter film and tried to get into UCLA's film school. "I was number one in my class in Cincinnati, but they only take 12 students, so I didn't get accepted." She stayed on in Los Angeles and worked for actor Michael Moriarty and producer Norman Lear. " I did gofering work. I was on sets and saw how the world rolled, making movies. I thought my whole world had collapsed because I was not going to be a set designer." Her parents nudged her toward Michigan State University, where she earned a master's degree in art. Then it was on to the University of London and elsewhere in Europe, where she learned about the art and architecture. "Like everyone else, I decided I'd start a career in New York. I wasn't going to Chicago - I knew Chicago like the palm of my hand." In the following years she held a number of jobs, and as she learned and saved her money, Post prepared for the flowering of her career. "I was an art director," she says of that period in her life. "I tried to do filem work; I worked under a couple of designers. I knew that somehow I had to get into architecture and design, and, through God's blessing, I did some styling for some stores, I did some window design, I did store displays." At 30 she made her move. "I decided to open my own design studio. And I did it out in the Hamptons, on a little country road in a huge old barn." It was an entrepreneurial gamble that more experienced businesspeople would probably have told her could not succeed. Her working capital came from her savings and a small bank loan. "Nobody wanted the barn," she remembers. "It was on Southampton's North Sea Road - it wasn't even on Main Street. I paid $500 rent." The designer did much of the fix-up work herself, traveling by bicycle because her driver's license had lapsed. "I took the barn floors and made them white lacquer. I took oil-based paint and put it on the barn walls, so you walked into this very hallowed, angelic space." As her shop was off in the boonies, Post made plywood sandwich boards tha read "North Sea House Antiques & Design," with a huge arrow. "That's how people found me." The arrow pointed the way for a man who helped launch her carrer. "It was in the 90s," she recalls, "when banking was really big. He pulls up in his Range Rover, and he jumps out with his golded retriever. He's obviously an investment banker, the protégé of one of the big guys. He cames in wearing his swim trunks and says, 'Your sense of style is incredible.'" He just bought a place on Manhattan's Gramercy Park and wanted to buy out her inventory, a combination of Biedermeier and modern pieces, which she had brought from Europe and displayed with the simplicity that has become her hallmark. A check for $100,000 sealed the deal, with an agreement that Post would design his apartment. Even so, the opening of her New York office took some doing. "Iwas poor. I lived on cucumbers. I remember it was more important for me to buy stationery with my name on it than to eat well. Finally, I had my own stationery, my own business cards. I don't think I went out to dinner for three years, but I was determined, and my father never gave me a cent." As it has turned out, there have been clients aplenty for what Jennifer Post calls "my look and my dialogue." It was the antithesis of clutter. "I hate drapes," she will tell you, "I hate fluffy fabrics. I can't stand Martha Stewart. I can't stand anything that's fluffy and pretty. "I'm a modernist," she continues, "but I don't like it when people say that modern has to be cold. I'm for those people who want volume and light and space and elegance. Elegance! Elegance! Elegance! Elegance doesn't have to be brocades and heavy materisl. I'm for the confident person who wants life to be easier. When you have less, life is less complicated." In addition to having an office in New York, Post, with her staff of five, is also working out of Palm Beach and Los Angeles. A self-described perfectionist, she so involves herself in each project that she rejects the notion of expansion or developing product sidelines. As she puts it, "I never wanted to have my name on towels. I never wanted to do a book. And I don't care about becoming rich. I'm 42. I've got the next 20, 30 years to refine and become better and better."