For a crowd of well-heeled New Yorkers, summer’s unofficial start falls a week after Memorial Day weekend. That’s when the Veuve Clicquot Polo Classic draws a crowd, decked out in linen pantsuits and resort collections, to Liberty Island for the champagne-soaked sporting event. A lucky few from the tony crowd took in the sights from the match’s La Grande Dame cabana pavilion, designed by Stephanie Goto and adorned with Paola Paronetto ceramics.
Earlier this year, the maison teamed up with Paronetto on a colorful array of collectors’ boxes and sculptural champagne magnums to commemorate the 2015 La Grande Dame vintage—so named for Madame Clicquot, the original grande dame. The pavilion’s Veuve-yellow facade gave way to an interior bursting with Paronetto’s kaleidoscopic hues: oceanic blues, seafoam greens, and lilac. “I use color very selectively in my work; it’s very intentional,” Goto says. “I took [those colors] as an inspiration.”
Staggering views of the Manhattan skyline also served as something of a revelation to Goto, who nodded to the city’s shadow with a mural of silhouetted champagne bottles installed along the structure’s backbone. “The ‘backbone’ is a word used to describe the structural quality of the wine. I wanted to embrace some of those characteristics of the wine in the architecture,” she says. “The ethos of champagne is so aligned to architecture in terms of how you conceive it, the creative process of using materials to create something super unique every single year, and using that materiality and pushing to different dimensions.”
Below, take a tour of the pavilion.
