John Saladino
1939-2025
John Saladino, the self-taught international designer of estates, luxury towers, interiors, gardens, and furniture, died July 26th at his home in Montecito, California. He was 86.
For nearly 60 years, John created exquisite living environments for prominent people, including Judith and Brian Little, Paul Junger Witt, Susan Harris, Norman Lear, and Joel Grey.
Saladino’s signature style, which merged classical elements with modern design—was an unheard-of combination in the early 1960s. “I mixed the machine with the palace,” he often commented. Magazine editors quickly took note, and Saladino-designed homes graced the covers of high-profile shelter magazines, such as House & Garden, Veranda, and The New York Times Magazine. At its height, his eponymous design firm in New York City, housed in a block-long building in the New York Design Center on Lexington Avenue, employed over forty people.
Born to Italian-European parents in Kansas City, Missouri, Saladino evinced an innate interest in residential design at an early age. While accompanying the family housekeeper to the trolley, Saladino would sneak into the local drugstore to purchase Town & Country Magazine featuring spreads of great houses all over the world. He shocked his Cub Scout den mother with his version of the Troop’s plywood scrapbook project; the 9-year-old Saladino’s scrapbook featured layouts of Jacobean architecture (as opposed to images of professional baseball players). Saladino’s father, a physician, was informed of his son’s creative talent by one of his patients, renowned painter Thomas Hart Benton, who, after viewing young Saladino’s drawings, proclaimed, “This child has serious talent!”
Saladino graduated from the University of Notre Dame and later received his MFA from Yale School of Art and Architecture, alongside classmates Charles Gwathmey, Robert A.M. Stern, Chuck Close, Richard Serra, and Nancy Graves. “It was an interesting recipe, and if you survived that group of piranhas, New York City was actually not that bad,” he later remembered of his Yale experience.
He founded his prestigious New York firm in 1969, and as his success increased, he purchased an 18-acre estate in Connecticut called Robin Hill. The seven-bedroom Neo-Georgian home became both a weekend refuge and a party locale for Saladino, his beloved wife Virginia, and their son, Graham. The Saladinos entertained in grand style, with copious amounts of silver, china, crystal, and floral arrangements. Descriptions of the aesthetic rituals associated with these social events found their way into Saladino’s first book, Saladino Style, which also features early examples of the designer’s work.
Unable to locate appropriate furniture to satisfy his exacting standards, Saladino established his own 80-piece collection in 1987. (That Business, helmed by his son Graham Saladino, continues to thrive; his glass cylinder lamp, first produced in 1971, remains a modern and timeless best seller.)
Saladino’s landscape designs often rivaled his interiors, as evidenced by Villa, his second book documenting his restoration of an early 1930s stone house and grounds in Montecito, where he relocated in the 1990s. As with design, Saladino’s interest in landscape dated back to his childhood, where the family gardener taught young Saladino how to plant rose bushes and trim trees.
“You’ll know you’ve been successful [with garden design] when people become very quiet,” he has said, “that means they are doing the same thing they do at a concert – they’re sitting still to escape into a transcendental world.”
John leaves behind his son Graham, his daughter-in-law Kristen, and his beloved granddaughter Ava.
