COLLECTIVE VISION

With help from designer Fernando Santangelo, filmmaker Fabiola Beracasa Beckman fashions a family-friendly showcase for a lifetime's worth of art and objects in her Greenwich Village town house

- DEREK C. BLASBERG

Fabiola Beracasa Beckman, a filmmaker and fashion industry veteran, grew up on New York’s Upper East Side.

The daughter of Veronica Hearst, one of her era’s most stylish society swans, she was raised in a lavish Fifth Avenue apartment designed by Renzo Mongiardino featuring columns, tapestries, and Old Master paintings. “I had the great honor of spending many afternoons with him,” she says of the legendary decorator. “Initially, he was a set designer by trade, and one of the central lessons I learned from him was that absolutely anything is possible with fantastic design.”

In her 20s, she started forging her own aesthetic path, collecting Jean-Michel Frank furniture and eventually moving downtown, where she lived in all-glass modernist towers. She invested in The Hole, a gallery first established on the Bowery focusing on emerging artists, and became its creative director.

Beracasa Beckman’s impossible design dream? Combining Mongiardino's theatrical classicism with a new penchant for minimalism and edge. Now a documentary producer (the Emmy-nominated Diane von Furstenberg: Woman in Charge was a recent project), these days she lives in an 1820s Federal-style Greenwich Village town house with her husband and their three children. “Mongiardino’s theatrical layering, Ponti’s modernist optimism, and Frank’s restrained elegance formed the foundation of my aesthetic vocabulary. They taught me that design, like filmmaking, is about creating dialogue between history and modernity, intellect and emotion, comfort and beauty.”