NEW YORK -- When Georg Andersen left New York to live in Arkansas, there was consternation in certain circles where he is considered one of America's most talented interior designers.
'Panic set in with some of my residential clients -- along with a chuckle, of course,' said Andersen. 'Imagine anyone leaving a successful business in New York to move to Arkansas!'
The day before Andersen made the move two years ago, he received a call from the general manager of the New York Hilton asking him to redecorate one of the hotel's two luxury penthouses. When informed that the designer would have to work out of Arkansas, the manager replied, 'Well, go ahead and do it.'
Ever since, this modern-day Arkansas Traveller has spent every sixth week in New York working on the duplex penthouse, which he recently completed. It is the largest hotel suite in the world, featuring a dramatic foyer with spiral staircase, living room, library, dining room, kitchen and four bedroom suites, all reached by private elevator.
The penthouse is used for a variety of promotional parties, convention entertaining, VIP guests ranging from Mary Martin and President Gerald Ford to assorted Saudi princes, and the hotel's richest and most discriminating clients. It recently was the setting for scenes in Bette Midler's film, 'The Rose.'
Andersen spends the five weeks between New York visits working out of Little Rock, Ark., where he heads the interior design subsidiary of Cromwell Neyland Truemper Levy and Gatchell, the city's leading architect-engineering firm.
'I never intended to live in the South, but I married a girl from Arkansas whom I had met in Alaska while I was in military service,' Andersen said in an interview in the penthouse drawing room, sumptuously furnished with Chinese and English antiques that live comfortably with contemporary sofas and chairs.
'She was an elementary schoolteacher in Alaska and had plans to go to Australia. I put an end to that, and she put an end to my plans to go to the University of Trondheim in Norway (his ancestral home) to study architecture.'
Instead, Andersen, a 1961 graduate of New York's Parsons School of Design who studied architecture at Fontainebleau in France, applied his nose to the grindstone with a series of top decorators in New York and began a family of three children. He worked on hotel and restaurant projects all over the United States and in England, Monte Carlo, and Jamaica.
When Andersen opened his own firm on prestigious Madison Avenue, he says, 'I set up my books to take a loss the first year, but everything opened up to me and I'd never been busier,' he recalls. 'My clients were big corporations and residential accounts all over the country. I found myself working 27 hours a day and no time to parent my children. On a summer visit to Arkansas, I made a contact with the Cromwell firm and they wanted to take me on. It was the furthest thing from my mind.'
Cromwell was persistent and Andersen decided the timing was right. He and his wife, Annabelle, had seen a hilltop Colonial house in Conway, Ark., framed by pinewoods and lake, that they decided was their dreamhouse. They bought it and six months later settled in Arkansas.
Andersen commutes 30 miles each day to Little Rock. He forces himself to keep an 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. schedule to have time to be with his family.
'I'd always had clients out of state when I worked in New York, so all I've done is reverse the situation,' he said. 'All my residential work is by word of mouth anyway. Right now I'm designing the interiors of houses in New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Washington, D.C., Virginia, Texas and Idaho.'
'I have three people who do my legwork in New York. Little Rock and Dallas designers generally rely on the Chicago market, which is great for commercial jobs. But my commercial jobs have to have more personality. I do a great deal of work for big corporations such as Phelps Dodge.'
He has just finished a five-story bank in Tupelo, Miss., where he had total design control, from the color of the exterior brick to interior spatial allocations, furnishings and accessories. He assembled a 110-piece collection of American art which is displayed from the main banking room to the storeroom in line with the philosophy of 'Why shouldn't the storeroom workers enjoy art, too?'
'Tupelo doesn't have a museum, so the bank is going to make up for that,' Andersen said. 'I've never been prouder of a job in my life.'
He is working on Little Rock's Capital Hotel, an 1880 cast iron front structure that he is restoring to its Victorian appearance with a little Queen Anne and chinoiserie thrown in for elegance. Every room with be furnished with old, one-of-a-kind furniture and floral carpets are being reproduced from original patches found in the hotel.
Hilton manager Jorgen Hansen, formerly of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, offered redecoration of the West Penthouse to Andersen because he had been impressed with Andersen's redecoration of the Waldorf lobby area when he was working for the Ellen McCluskey design firm. William Pahlmann had decorated the 8,000 square feet of penthouse space in a cool, impersonal style for the hotel's opening in 1963. Over the years, the Pahlmann installation had become haphazardly re-arranged and worn.
'My biggest challenge doing the penthouse was making it warm,' Andersen said. 'The spaces are vast and the floors are all pale beige marble. So I used lots of Chinese reds and gave it a strong traditional influence. l love color and what it does. I use only natural fabrics, which are both sumptuous and practical.'
Andersen claims he has no specific style, having ranged from a purely contemporary home on Manhattan's Sutton Place to a prize-winning Louis XVI home in Scarsdale, N.Y. He will work with furniture that clients already have on the theory that if something is 'terrible,' the client will eventually see that it is wrong.
'But I rarely have that problem,' he said. 'Today everyone is very open-minded and will give anything a shot. More people realize that it's cheaper in the long run to go to an interior designer than to try to do a decorating job on their own, especially if the designer is architecturally knowledgeable. You can save a bundle, because you won't have to take it out and do it over.
'As far as cost goes, I have a down sofa of my own design that costs much less than one you can get in a department store.'
