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Art & Design|John Saladino, ‘Sensualist’ Designer With a Love of Ruins, Dies at 86
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/arts/design/john-saladino-dead.html
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A renowned interior designer, he created instantly recognizable rooms using lush fabrics, oversize antiques and imperfectly plastered walls that convey a sense of age.
July 28, 2025Updated 6:04 p.m. ET
John Saladino, one of the most renowned interior designers of the last half century, who layered rooms with lush fabrics and oversize antiques while establishing a sense of order that reflected his Bauhaus lineage, died on Saturday at his home in Montecito, Calif. He was 86.
His son, Graham, confirmed the death.
Mr. Saladino’s instantly recognizable “look” won him countless magazine covers and influenced generations of designers. In his heyday, in the 1970s and ’80s, he lived like a king in a New York apartment with a triple-height living room and on a sprawling Connecticut estate. His 40th birthday party in 1979, thrown by his wife, Virginia Saladino, was covered by The New York Times.
Mr. Saladino did not trace his success to his childhood in Kansas City, Mo. “In the middle of America, there was a kind of puritanical suspicion of anything that’s too sensual or too theatrical,” he wrote in his 2000 book, “Style by Saladino.”
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The opposite was true in Rome, where he lived while he was in his 20s. That city, he wrote, “released the romantic in me, freeing me from the inhibitions and guilt instilled in me by my Catholic education.”
“His time in Rome made him a kind of sensualist,” Wendy Moonan, a journalist who became friends with Mr. Saladino after writing about him for Town & Country in the 1980s, said in an interview. “He was very much into food and wine, having beautiful things around him.”
