41 WSJ. MAGAZINE
E
VEN TRITE vacation-house names have
uncanny staying power. So it is with Casa
de Mañana, Alan Wanzenberg’s home in
the village of Nosara, a surf-and-yoga spot
on Costa Rica’s Nicoya Peninsula. Wanzenberg, an
architect, is the Casa’s third owner. When it was
built in the early 1970s by Stevens Sperling, an
American engineer and amateur naturalist, the bun-
galow offered a view of the Pacific from its veranda.
Sperling positioned his drop-leaf desk in one corner
to face the setting sun; Wanzenberg has replaced
it with a dining table of his own design and added
a weather gauge on a nearby wall (forecast: hot and
dry from November to April; hot and wet from May
through October). On certain summer afternoons,
he stands and watches as water careens down the
slope below. “It’s a resilient landscape,” he says.
“Resiliency is pretty profound. There’s a life par-
allel—the notion of sparse, severe moments and
moments of lushness and fecundity.”
Wanzenberg, 68, is a buff, fastidious man who’s
made being in the moment something of a life prac-
tice. From his home base in New York, he works with
thoughtful efficiency designing houses, mostly, for
luminaries of the art and entertainment worlds.
Peter Brant, Robert Gober, Ross Bleckner and Mick
Jagger have each enlisted Wanzenberg’s layered
approach to modernism, as much the product of his
Illinois upbringing and far-flung travel as his time at
the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Wanzenberg had his first success in the 1980s
with Jed Johnson, his business and life partner at the
time. A self-taught decorator, Johnson cultivated a
sensuous style influenced by French modernism and
the English Arts and Crafts movement that seemed
all the more intriguing given the dozen years, start-
ing in 1968, that he’d spent at Andy Warhol’s Factory
and in a relationship with the artist—hoarder of
everything from cookie jars and kachina dolls toBY SARAH MEDFORD
PHOTOGRAPHY BY WILLIAM ABRANOWICZArchitect Alan Wanzenberg
transformed a modest bungalownestled in the lush jungles of
Costa Rica’s Nicoya Peninsulainto a rejuvenating retreat with
a surf-camp vibe.SURF’S UP
A SIMPLE PLAN (^) DESIGNER DIGS
Alan Wanzenberg designed the
Guanacaste-wood coffee table and
added the shelving in the living
room. The four Cuba Chairs are by
Morten Gøttler.
the exchange.
AUGUST 2019