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The Flea Market. As fortune followed fame, he began spending some of the fortune on his personal tastes−which are expensive. He usually spends part of the winter in the $100,000 dream house he designed and built in the desert near Palm Springs, Calif., complete with a swimming pool which curves into the living room. Summer always finds him back in France, where he has three homes. His relaxing spot is Le Torpillou (the Little Torpedo), a bright, red-tiled villa overlooking the Cote d'Azur at St. Tropez, and littered with such things as underwater fishing gear, which he seldom uses. Near Rambouillet, outside Paris, he has a 16th Century manor, La Cense, once a lovecote for Henri IV; it teems with game which Loewy seldom hunts, but he admires the elegant design of its peacocks. Last year he acquired an apartment on Paris' Quai d'Orsay, decorated it with everything from braced halberds with baby-pink shafts and ribboned bows to crystal chandeliers picked up at Paris' flea market.
In his Manhattan apartment, Loewy has blithely mixed a modern mirror fireplace, French period pieces, an Oriental shrine and a crystal chandelier reminiscent of Versailles. Instead of scattering his considerable collection of modern art (Picasso, Miro and Matisse) about the room, he hung them all frame-to-frame on one wall, used a big Dufy as a hinged cover to conceal his television set which is built into the wall. Some visitors might quail at such a mish mash, but Mrs. Loewy loyally approves it all, saying "I think he has good taste." Loewy himself has given a more complex definition of his special talents. Says he: "Good design keeps the user happy, the manufacturer in the black, and the esthete unoffended."
Clay Impressions. In the brave new world of industrial design, the brave new designers were hard at work trying to keep users happier by hundreds of new products.
Must telephones have their numbers where the dialing finger obscures them? Designer Dreyfuss' new home telephone for the Bell System has the numbers outside.
How could chairs be made more comfortable? Manhattan's Designer Egmont Arens thought it could be done by taking clay impressions of fat, skinny and in-between posteriors. A one-piece plastic chair with compound curves more comfortable than straight lines was being popped out by General American Transportation Corp. at the rate of one every five minutes.
Did all refrigerators and home freezers have to be white and hard to keep clean? Milwaukee's Designer Brooks Stevens, who designed the Milwaukee Road's gleaming new bubble-domed Hiawatha train, thought not; he had already turned out a blue freezer (for Ben Hur) which was making bigger companies sit up and take note.
Must theaters have only a small number of seats in the choicest orchestra rows? At Manhattan's Savoy-Plaza hotel, Designer Bel Geddes was transforming about 10,000 square feet of lobby, dining and storage space into a modern theater which, devoid of a proscenium arch and extending the stage into the audience, boosts the orchestra seating from the average 300 to 800, using fewer rows of seats.