Fabiola Beracasa Beckman, a filmmaker and style trade veteran, grew up on New York’s Upper East Side. The daughter of Veronica Hearst, certainly one of her period’s most fashionable society swans, she was raised in a lavish Fifth Avenue condo designed by Renzo Mongiardino that includes columns, tapestries, and Old Master work. “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 began forging her personal aesthetic path, amassing Jean-Michel Frank furnishings and finally transferring downtown, the place she lived in all-glass modernist towers. She invested in The Hole, a gallery first established on the Bowery specializing in rising artists, and have become its inventive director.
Beracasa Beckman’s inconceivable design dream? Combining Mongiardino’s theatrical classicism with a brand new penchant for minimalism and edge. Now a documentary producer (the Emmy-nominated Diane von Furstenberg: Woman in Charge was a latest mission), lately she lives in an 1820s Federal-style Greenwich Village city home together with her husband and their three youngsters. “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.”