We met Mr. Ostroff, who is 30 and lives in Northampton, Mass., some weeks ago, at the Architectural Digest Home Design Show, where the work he was displaying included doors he had taken out of his own home — which, in a photo, looked like a New England saltbox house, not the usual backdrop for Art Nouveau.
It turns out that Mr. Ostroff learned metal fabrication in the machine shop of his father, a mechanical engineer, and left college after a year to devote himself to his work. Recently, we talked to him about his designs.
There seems to be an Art Nouveau thing going on in your work.
Yup, I describe my style as Art Nouveau-inspired, but I don’t think it was — I think I simply identify with it, and the designs and the theme that I am working with are just inside me. Like any artist, I feel deeply compelled to get them out.
You live in a fairly typical-looking house, but there’s a lot of your own work built into it. From your photos, I can see that there is an elaborate stainless steel balcony.
My house is an American four-square — in the 20s, you could buy these Sears kit homes. If you look at it from the outside, it’s perfectly square, four square dormers on the roof. But in every direction, on every floor, there is a sculpture or a pair of doors or a railing.
Connecting that upper patio to the lower patio is a stainless steel spiral staircase. I was commissioned at about the same time we were building this addition to make three spiral staircases for a client here in Massachusetts. I just built an extra one on the side. The commissioned staircases were stainless steel and interesting, but the one I brought for my own house I fleshed out with more ornate details.
What happened to the doors you were displaying at the Architectural Digest show?
They got a great response, then I brought them back to my house. I am so emotionally invested in that stuff, I could never part with it.
How much do you charge for your pieces?
For a similar interior door, it would be $15,000 to $20,000. Fireplace doors and a surround — that is, like, $12,500. I designed a pair of fireplace doors as a display piece for the show, which also fit our fireplace at home, which was the last untouched part of our living room.
There’s an old surfing song that goes, “New York’s a lonely town when you’re the only surfer boy around.” Do you ever get the feeling you were born not only in the wrong place, but in the wrong century?
Yeah, I do, because a lot of the music I listen to was written in the 1800s, early 1900s: Beethoven’s later works, Rachmaninoff, Liszt, Chopin. My thesis at Hampshire College was that music exists in time, and sculpture exists in space, but with some of the designs that I am doing I am almost composing a piece of music in space. Some of the designs, your eye looks at them and I think your brain can almost interpret them as music.
What else have you done with the house?
The most recent project was a kitchen renovation. Without a whole lot of direction or planning we decided to rip our kitchen apart, but our house is only so big. The only solution I could come up with was to rip the ceiling out and go up. We sacrificed the bedroom that was over the kitchen, but the kitchen now has a 20-foot ceiling, and I left a little bit of that bedroom floor and turned it into a balcony.
Ah, the balcony, beloved of romantic designers.
With a curved front. I have a church pew in the balcony, and to sit there and watch my wife make dinner below, it’s pretty cool. That railing is the most recent piece, and to stand behind it is very satisfying.
At the beginning of the conversation we were talking about the age of house, and it has been a challenge to design and create pieces in stainless steel that still work with the overall aesthetic of a house built in 1922, but I think it’s a healthy mix of new and old.
We’re getting back to the idea that you may be living in the wrong century.
Yeah, but I don’t know that I could live without my iPhone.
You must go crazy when you visit Paris.
I’ve been to Paris twice. I actually proposed to my wife there.
Where did you propose?
Beneath the Eiffel Tower, which is sort of the world’s largest metal sculpture.
Information: salmonstudios.com.
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