Fashion Maven Liz Lange Takes Us Inside Her Chic Palm Beach Getaway
It should have been a meet-cute for the ages. Time: mid-1980s. Place: Brown University. She’s a bookish New Yorker with flair to spare. He’s a small-town New Jerseyan with a penchant for pottery. They’re about to embark on an instant, lifelong best-friendship, not to mention becoming pioneering designers with eponymous empires. In 1998, Liz Lange Maternity will permanently transform pregnancy apparel from frumpy to formfitting, while Jonathan Adler’s first store, in New York’s SoHo, will simultaneously create and sate a national appetite for cheeky-glam ceramics and home furnishings.
Yet, as Lange says about that long-ago moment when she met Adler: “I wish the story were more interesting, but frankly it’s not. A mutual friend brought Jonathan when he came to visit me in my dorm room. The rest is history.”
Flash-forward to 2020, and if it’s a long weekend or a national holiday, you’ll likely find the duo lounging poolside with their spouses—Lange’s husband is a corporate lawyer, Adler’s is the writer and designer Simon Doonan—at Lange’s new vacation home in Palm Beach, Florida. Since winding down her partnerships with Target and HSN, Lange has turned her attention to investing in and consulting for brands that speak to her as a consumer (among them: sportswear line Carbon38, Tiny Organics baby food, and Rinse, a dry-cleaning delivery app) while nurturing a growing obsession with home and garden design.
In early 2019, with her children Gus and Alice now in college, Lange decided to create a bright, colorful home away from home for her nearest and dearest—a place where comfort rules, the food never runs out, and her offspring can’t resist returning to on school breaks. Fueled by warm memories of childhood trips to the town’s historic Breakers hotel, she chose an early-1900s Spanish Colonial—stucco walls, tile roof, ample pink bougainvillea—on the Intracoastal Waterway, essentially a 3,000-mile-long extension of her backyard.
When it came time to decorate, Lange knew exactly what she wanted and who her partner in crime would be (obviously). “I craved the opposite of what we have in New York,” she says about her city life. “Pinks and greens; blues and whites; trellis wallpapers; lots of lacquer; wicker, bamboo, and rattan; palm trees, palm leaves, animals. A surreal fantasy where nothing bad could ever happen. And nobody gets that better than Jonathan.”
“We’re such old besties that I know exactly who she is, and she knows exactly who I am,” Adler concurs. “Pulling this place together involved the two of us hanging out as we usually do,” she adds. “It was so much fun just to have an excuse to go shopping,” he muses.
Cue a sun-kissed rom-com shopping montage featuring Lange and Adler darting in and out of Palm Beach’s many vintage stores (where they found most of the wicker, bamboo, and rattan) to the groovy melodies of 1970s throwbacks Helen Reddy, Olivia Newton-John, and the Carpenters on repeat (the house soundtrack). The end result, in Adler’s words, “is a mirror of who Liz is: bold, glamorous, colorful, and confident. Think Liz Lange meets the essence of Palm Beach meets explosion of lemon sorbet of the soul.”
Central to Lange’s vision was making the place feel like a home while it functions more like a hotel. “I guess retail is in my blood. I’m all about customer service!” she says with a laugh. All five of the bedrooms are free of family and personal effects so that each can serve as a guest room; they instead feature a “minibar” tray stocked with water bottles, Kind bars, jars full of candy, an unopened iPhone charger, and a laminated instruction card for the TV and house Wi-Fi, among other necessities. Every bathroom is furnished with piles of white towels of varying sizes (“Nothing is worse than not enough towels,” Lange laments) and a basket of amenities that includes toiletries emblazoned with the home’s address. Bathrobes, check. Slippers, check. Daily laundry and nightly turndown service, check, check.
Because half the point of being there is spending time outside, Lange equipped the house with a fleet of six bikes (three pink and three white, complete with wicker baskets), three paddleboards, and two Jet Skis. Baskets stuffed with beach towels, sunblock, bug repellent, and pool toys are always at the ready. In short, it is virtually impossible for a guest to walk through the front door and into that Alice in Wonderland black and white-floored foyer and not have a wish be met.
“It all feels conjured, seamless, and not real,” Adler says.
“I wear a caftan the entire time,” Lange says.
“She has about 5,000 different caftans, each one more Mrs. Roper than the last,” Adler confirms.
“Caftans perfectly represent the spirit of the house!” Lange says. “Fantasy and reality. Light and easy. Friends and family of all ages lazing around. To me, that’s what this house is about.”
This story originally appeared in the April 2020 issue of ELLE Decor. SUBSCRIBE
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