“International Style,” by Charles Gandee, originally appeared in the August 1996 issue of Vogue.

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In the first 21 weeks of this year, Annabelle Selldorf took 46 flights, covering 94,282 miles. Her itinerary included seven trips to Munich, five to Rome, four to Bermuda, four to Zurich, three to Venice, three to London, two to Cologne, and one to Mustique.

Even when she’s not in the air, Selldorf is constantly on the move—her cellphone bills tell the story. In the first four months of the year, they totaled $2,302.93: $1,040.52 for AT&T Wireless and $1,262.41 for Alpha Tel, its European counterpart.

Then there’s the less quantifiable but equally revealing statistic: how often she cancels her twice-weekly 6:30 a.m. training sessions with Lesley Howes at the David Barton Gym on Madison Avenue. According to Howes, it’s “more often than not.” She admits, “Usually, I’d be annoyed by last-minute cancellations, but Annabelle always has a good excuse—like being stranded at some foggy European airport.”

Reflecting on her jet-setting lifestyle, Selldorf quips, “At this point, the only real difference between a weekend in Queens and one in Zurich is that the food’s better in Zurich.” Then, as if worried the remark might sound flippant (which she isn’t), she adds, “I know how awful that sounds, but it’s true.”

You might assume Selldorf is a high-ranking diplomat or a corporate executive, but she’s actually a 36-year-old architect who runs a small firm in Lower Manhattan. She started it in 1987 from a corner of her SoHo loft after a young couple on a budget hired her to renovate their Upper West Side kitchen.

Nine years later, Selldorf no longer has to explain the harsh reality of New York kitchen remodels—that $20,000 doesn’t go far. These days, you’re more likely to find her along Venice’s Rio della Pietà, restoring a 12th-century Gothic palazzo, or on Zurich’s Limmatstrasse, converting an old brewery into a gallery inspired by Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus. Or in London’s St. James’s Gardens, modernizing a 19th-century rectory to Architectural Digest standards.

While these projects might make her the envy of every architect under 40 in Manhattan, her passport-stamped lifestyle comes at a cost. “Do I have a boyfriend?” she sighs. “Are you trying to make me cry? I don’t even own a houseplant.” Despite Zurich’s culinary perks, she insists, “Contrary to what people think, it’s not glamorous at all.” (This from someone who effortlessly switches between English, German, French, and Italian.) “But the work is more interesting. There are only so many opportunities in New York.”

It’s true—most young, female-led firms in Manhattan land commissions for shops, apartments, or the occasional Hamptons addition. But Selldorf has outpaced her peers. In SoHo, she’s become this decade’s answer to 1100 Architect, the downtown firm that, at its peak in the late ’80s, counted Ross Bleckner, Eric Fischl, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, and Jacqueline Schnabel among its clients. Like them, Selldorf built her reputation within SoHo’s art scene, designing budget-friendly galleries and… (text continues)Ann Selldorf designs living spaces that are clean, minimal, precise, and often white. She enhances the industrial character of SoHo’s historic buildings by leaving elements like iron columns and radiators exposed—but meticulously cleaned and sandblasted to perfection. Her kitchens often feature stainless-steel fittings, sourced from restaurant supply shops on the Bowery and installed with the same precision as vintage French walnut cabinetry in a Park Avenue home.

This modernist approach comes naturally to Selldorf, who grew up in one of the few residential lofts in Cologne, filled with sleek Gio Ponti-style furniture chosen by her architect father. After high school, she worked in a furniture store to save money for a trip to New York, where she met a French boy who made her want to stay. When her funds ran out, she returned to Cologne, worked on a construction site, saved up, and eventually moved back to Manhattan—only to find the French boy gone. She enrolled at Pratt Institute to study architecture and, to afford her tiny, windowless walk-up near Columbus Avenue, talked her way into a job at Richard Gluckman’s firm, known for designing Larry Gagosian’s pristine SoHo gallery and Dia’s serene West 22nd Street space.

Of her SoHo projects, Selldorf admits, “Sometimes I think what I do borders on boring because it’s not very loud.” But in the post-1980s era, subtlety was seen as a virtue—in both architecture and fashion (think Calvin Klein and Donna Karan’s minimalist phases). For Selldorf, restraint isn’t just a trend; it’s a philosophy. She believes architects should work discreetly, focusing on proportion and detail rather than bold statements. “My aesthetic is restrained, and therefore fundamentally modern,” she says, proud that her work doesn’t push a specific style.

Unlike Richard Meier’s stark white houses or Frank Gehry’s sculptural museums, Selldorf’s designs blend in. “I want my work to feel like it belongs to the person and the place,” she explains. “If I design a Fifth Avenue apartment for a banker, it shouldn’t look like a SoHo loft for an artist.” While her belief in context-driven design isn’t new, her execution is distinctive.

Take David Salle’s Long Island compound, where Selldorf drew inspiration from early 20th-century houses and potato barns. She arranged four cedar-clad structures—a house, studio, garage, and pool pavilion—around a central courtyard, avoiding nostalgic details like shutters or gingerbread trim in favor of clean simplicity. “I wanted to explore abstraction within traditional forms,” she says. Equally important was shaping outdoor “rooms” between the buildings. “Of course, I care about how the buildings look,” she adds, “but for me, the spaces in between are just as crucial.””What happens between the buildings is just as important as the buildings themselves.” Though Salle never specifically asked for the series of outdoor “rooms,” Selldorf became fixated on creating them. “You know,” she says, “in twenty years, when I look back on my work, I don’t want to think I just did what people told me to do.”

While Selldorf’s current client list, as the Salle project suggests, leans toward the wealthy and well-known, her distaste for flashy architectural excess hasn’t changed since her early days in SoHo. Last year, when Barneys New York decided to renovate the fifth floor of its Madison Avenue store, Gene Pressman brought in Selldorf. She stripped away every trace of luxury left by architect Peter Marino, who had designed the space just two years earlier. Instead of Marino’s signature gold-leaf ceilings, sycamore paneling, and Jean-Michel Frank club chairs upholstered in tobacco suede, Selldorf bathed the space in white—naturally—and as a counterpoint to the sharp-edged steel clothing racks, she added a collection of quirky 1940s furniture she’d found at Fred Silberman’s not-quite-antique shop in SoHo. And perhaps to prove she’s not above a little retail irony, she designed a pair of freestanding oval dressing rooms that look suspiciously like Parisian pissoirs.

Pissoirs and vintage furniture aside, what really stands out at Barneys isn’t Selldorf’s design—it’s the work of Isaac Mizrahi, Michael Kors, Victor Alfaro, and Dolce & Gabbana. Veteran New York art dealer Barbara Gladstone, who’s now collaborating with Selldorf on an 8,000-square-foot Chelsea gallery, confirms that Selldorf prioritizes function. “What I appreciate about Annabelle is that she makes the architecture serve the art. In other words, she wants things to work.” Gladstone also praises Selldorf for being “direct, clear, sensible, and sensitive—not to mention inspired. And she’s gorgeous, too.”

Given that women still face disadvantages in architecture, it’s no surprise Selldorf brushes off the “gorgeous” comment. She prefers a no-nonsense, almost androgynous “uniform”—usually a crisp white men’s shirt, a charcoal-gray Jil Sander suit, black Belgian loafers, and a black nylon Prada bag, which, unsurprisingly, holds a black leather planner and a black cell phone. The minimalist look suits her, shifting focus from the architect to the architecture.

Besides, if Selldorf only has a “uniform” to pack, she’s far more likely to catch that noon flight to Rome. And she has to make that flight—after berating David Salle’s contractor for falling behind on the pool pavilion, she’s off to Tuscany to arrange furniture in a once-derelict stable, now transformed into a dreamy stone-and-stucco retreat.