Ford's far-flung bedrooms are particularly uniform. Uniformly black, to be precise. Whether it's Los Angeles, London or Santa Fe, he sleeps in black cotton-satin Gucci sheets, beneath black fur throws, surrounded by black lacquer tables and black glass walls. "I am a complete insomniac and if there is a shred of light, I can't sleep," he says. (All that black isn't quite as dark as it sounds, however: "The glass is quite reflective," notes Ford.)
He prefers his other living spaces on the dark side too. Years ago, Ford took a stab at lightening up his London town house—but soon regretted it. "Because London weather is so gray, I thought I would crave light, so I wanted a white house," he says. He gutted the structure and installed stark white walls. "But it just ended up being very cold. So I began paneling all the rooms in rosewood or black glass. I made the house darker and darker, which is much better in London, where you want to curl up by the fire." Once the house was to Ford's liking, however, he decided it was too small—and sold it. He recently bought a Georgian-era town house that he is currently renovating.
The Los Angeles house also reflects its setting, particularly the spectacular treehouse vista. "I didn't want to block the view, and I didn't want colors to jump out at you," he says. "I wanted furniture that almost went away." Ford kept many of the tables and banquettes originally designed for the house by Neutra, but reupholstered them, mostly in mohair or ponyskin. The simple, low chairs he designed himself were covered in the same materials. "I wanted everything to feel built-in," he says.
Though Ford acknowledges that minimalism can end up "dry and fairly routine," he says that it can also be sensual and warm. To compensate for the strict stuff, he has two decorating dictates: "You need fire and you need fur." To that end, almost every room in the Neutra house has a fireplace and skins in abundance.
The Santa Fe house, a 1960s adobe ranch that was built by Ford's grandmother when he was a child, is usually the designer's base in the summer. It was originally relatively spartan, but the previous owners (Ford had to buy it back) had "Southwesternized it," as Ford puts it. So he replaced the tile floors with concrete, and, outside, built a James Turrell-like concrete-walled courtyard for the pool. "It's now much more severe," he says with satisfaction.
Ford's most spectacular residence is yet to come, however. He has just broken ground on a monumentally scaled house outside Santa Fe, designed by renowned Japanese architect Tadao Ando. With an architect of Ando's caliber, Ford had to do the wooing. But after Ando (a Pritzker Prize winner) accepted Ford's invitation to visit the site, he promptly accepted the commission. "Ando is so much about light and mass, which is so perfect for New Mexico," says Ford. "Historically, Spanish architecture in New Mexico had been about mud walls—with a fortresslike quality to them—and about light. The light is so strong that I wanted someone who would understand the importance of it." (The Los Angeles firm of Marmol Radziner, which has worked on all of Ford's houses, will serve as local architects for the project; interior designer Brad Dunning, Ford's longtime collaborator, will likely be involved, too.)
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