“I ’m kind of a black sheep in many ways. I don’t look like other architects, and I don’t collect like other people collect,” says Peter Marino. And it’s true. Marino is inarguably the architect most associated with fashion, with both Tiffany & Co.’s The Landmark in New York City and Dior’s 30 Avenue Montaigne in Paris in his portfolio, not to mention countless private residences and corporate headquarters. But he does things his own way, dressed like a biker daddy in black-leather outfits, police caps and rings that look like talons—all of which he designs himself. In fact he designs a lot of things himself: lights, furniture, textiles, glassware and big bronze boxes.
And Marino collects art in his own way, too. “I always collect high and low,” he says. It was something that began early on. The New York City native, whose father was an engineer and mother a secretary, was an art major in high school—he had drawn and painted from a young age—and began buying dishes and other French ceramics at flea markets in New York and Paris. Over the years, he’s built a collection of more than 1,200 pieces, and he still loves visiting flea markets, seeing them as places to find things that are overlooked or that people have turned up their noses at.
Marino enrolled in the architecture program at Cornell University and, after graduation, began his career at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. It was at 22 that he made his first major purchase: two works by Lucas Samaras. “I’ve collected ever since,” he says.
A chance introduction helped inform both his career and his collecting. A Cornell program allowed fourth-year students to attend class in Manhattan, on 17th Street at Union Square. That was also the location, in the 1970s, of Andy Warhol’s Factory and the legendary restaurant Max’s Kansas City. He and two friends from school would eat at Max’s, where they met people who worked at the Factory, including Vincent Fremont, Pat Hackett, Bob Colacello and eventually Warhol himself. “Very few people realize that [Warhol] had a real background in classic art,” says Marino. “He was very knowledgeable about art history.”
“In Southampton, there’s nothing like me. There’s nothing like me on the rest of Long Island, and I’m very happy to hear people say there’s nothing else like me in the world.”
Marino’s first solo project was for Fred Hughes, Warhol’s business manager. When Warhol bought his townhouse on East 66th Street, he asked Marino if he wanted to do it. “I got from him the idea that everything was art and most things were very beautiful and not to be pooh-poohed and looked over,” Marino recalls.
This overriding philosophy of collecting—omnivorously, far and wide—is more reminiscent of the broad collections of past centuries than of the tight curations of today. “I find so many collectors act as if they have horse blinders on, they’re very narrow in their scope, saying ‘I just collect modern art.’ And I go, ‘Well that’s nice. What else? What kind of furniture do you have?’ ‘Oh, I don’t care about furniture.’ ‘Well, what kind of carpets do you have?’ ‘I don’t care about carpets.’ ‘What kind of lamps?’” Marino says with a laugh. “I collect everything from Egyptian art to 17th-century French books to bronze to French furniture to photography to modern painting and modern sculpture.”
And for the record, his own carpets are Ukrainian Bessarabian rugs. “They’re very, very beautiful and they’re hard to get now,” he says, “but in the ’80s, there were quite a lot of them.” He also collects 17th- and 18th-century French books because, as he says, “In those days they didn’t have cameras, so when they had parties, the king would hire someone to make lithographs of all the guests and how they were seated. Your distance from the king indicates your social standing, which is something I think Trump is trying to revive.” Marino loves bronze because, like glass blowing, casting hasn’t changed or been mechanized.
Marino’s career as an architect included positions at George Nelson and I. M. Pei/Cossutta & Ponte before he opened his own firm in 1978. Through the Factory crowd, he also met prominent families such as the Rothschilds and the Agnellis and fashion-world folks like Valentino and Pierre Bergé and Yves Saint Laurent, all of whom Marino designed residential spaces for. The Pressman family, which owned Barneys New York, hired him to design the women’s retail store and then 17 Barneys locations around the world. Eventually Chanel, Donna Karan, Fendi, Calvin Klein, Giorgio Armani, Hublot and Louis Vuitton all became clients.
Today, he’s speaking to me from Seoul, where he is building two private homes and a Chanel store. “I have got to bring home the bacon,” he says wryly, of his constant stream of international projects. Marino is hyperarticulate, choosing his words carefully and speaking confidently and a little softly.
And no detail seems to escape his notice. In Seoul, he’s impressed with the investments that corporations have made in collecting art, with seemingly every major company having its own foundation. “We used to have it in America,” he says. “Do you remember when we had companies like Pepsi-Cola and they would have the campus full of paintings and, of course, the Ford Foundation?”
His answer to that, in a sense, is his own private Peter Marino Art Foundation, in Southampton, New York. “I show paintings, furniture and sculpture from all centuries reflecting a few thousand years of human art history,” he says, describing his approach to curation. The space opened in 2021 in a 19th-century building, previously the Rogers Memorial Library. (He particularly loves places with what he calls “good book karma.”) “I like the idea of a foundation where I summer because it’s a special time,” he explains. “I have this fantasy about things that happen in the summer that don’t happen during normal times. And if I did the foundation in Manhattan, let’s face it, there are 112 other ones. You would be just number 113. Whereas in Southampton, there’s nothing like me. There’s nothing like me on the rest of Long Island, frankly, and I’m very happy to hear people say there’s nothing else like me in the world.”
He calls it a house museum; others have compared it to the Frick Collection. Marino didn’t want it to have white walls and wood floors, to be indistinguishable from other art museums and galleries. Instead, his space has Venetian stucco and parquet floors and even—gasp—curtains. What started out as a fun idea has become all-consuming—as all-consuming as it can be for someone who is juggling dozens of projects at any given time—but he’s loved the role of museum director.
It’s also exposed him to a slice of the public that doesn’t keep up with starchitects or the fashion crowd—in a sense. “Some of the questions people ask the gals who give the tours include, ‘Is Peter Marino still alive?’ If that gives any indication,” he says with a cackle. “And then the number two question, which could only be in America, is, ‘So what’s his money from?’”
For Marino, the foundation has also been a good way to meet dealers, which begets more collecting. He wishes he had more Cy Twomblys. “I pass up on opportunities,” he says. “I have two beautiful ones, but I wish I had more—something that I remember passing up because it was always too expensive. I wish I had a Joan Mitchell, because that’s another one that I passed up.”
His pieces rotate among his residences in New York City, Aspen and Southampton, storage warehouses and the foundation. When asked if there is anything he’d like to keep solely for his own viewing, he quips, “You mean the porn? No, I’m sorry, I didn’t say that—I don’t want to be run out of Southampton. You have to be a little sensitive to the audience.”
Shows are planned out for the next three years. In 2026, Marino will stage a show of his trove of Betty Parsons paintings, at the same time that Bard College is slated to run a retrospective of Parsons’ work and that of artists she represented at her namesake gallery, including Barnett Newman and Jackson Pollock. “I’m just showing [Parsons’] paintings,” Marino explains, “but I’ll have them in a very long gallery, and en face there will be paintings from the Italian artist Carla Accardi, who painted at the same time. And it’s so interesting because there are clear sensibilities in decades that cross the ocean.” There are also plans for his collection of aesthetic movement Tiffany & Co. silver, from the late 19th century, which will be featured in a Phaidon book out next May.
The foundation often showcases the deep relationships Marino has with the contemporary artists whose works he collects, people like Tom Sachs, Richard Deacon, Erwin Wurm and Michal Rovner, who come out east for regular “Brunch with Bob” artist talks with Bob Colacello. Marino’s deep and fluid relationship to collecting extends to commissioning artists, such as Rashid Johnson, James Turrell, Vik Muniz, Sarah Sze, Julian Schnabel and Richard Prince, for his projects. “These are really interesting people, in touch with the times in which we live. I learn a great deal from them,” he says. Marino himself has become the subject of portraits, including by Julian Schnabel and Francesco Clemente. “Julian plays all of his music on his Spotify station,” Marino says of the sitting experience, “and Francesco is much more zen—you hear a little Tibetan bell once an hour or something.”
Marino wonders if the collecting will be his legacy. “I became an architect because I wanted to produce work that would last. But in my lifetime, so many things that I built have been destroyed. My Giorgio Armani building that won tons of awards on Madison Avenue, for instance, was knocked down. You know, those things really hurt because as an architect you think, Well, I’m creating something for generations, and that didn’t even make it 20 years,” he says. “So I’m actually telling you architecture is really impermanent.”
He pauses and sounds a little wistful. “If you have your portrait done, people save art. So maybe in 50 years, that’s all that’s going to be left of me,” he says. “Those bronze boxes and maybe a few of my portraits are what will last—and hopefully the foundation.”
