May 11, 2012
Bahram Sayari has worked for several decades in construction management, but his first love has always been art. Educated in England with undergraduate and post-graduate degrees in Industrial Design, he balances his work at Certified Construction of New York with two nights a week at the Art Students League, where he is a sculptor. He has lived in Leonia with his wife, Ann, a teacher at Columbia Grammar in Manhattan, and their two sons, Zal and Zubin, for the past 17 years.
Q: Where are you originally from?
A: I was raised in Tehran, Iran with my five sisters, parents and grandmother. My parents sent me to be educated in England when I was 15.
Q: When did you come to the U.S.?
A: In 1983, when I moved with my parents from London to Forest Hills, Queens.
Q: What was your first construction job?
A: In 1983 I purchased a small building in Jersey City with my brother-in-law and renovated it. Our projects kept growing in size until the market crash of 1987, when the Jersey City building boom crashed as well. I then started my own construction company, designing and building four to eight story buildings from start to finish.
Q: Was building and construction a childhood dream of yours?
A: No, I wanted to be a fine artist – a painter – but my father, an accountant, nixed that plan. He wanted a more stable career for me.
Q: What do you do in your present job?
A: I oversee the construction of townhouses and restaurants, mostly in Manhattan. It involves coordinating many highly skilled craftsmen, and the work they do can be really beautiful, so I enjoy these challenges. We have had many of our projects featured in architectural magazines. The work we did on architect Wallace Harrison’s landmark summer home in Huntington, Long Island was featured in the Spring 2012 issue of Modernism magazine.
Q: What are some restaurants your firm has constructed in the city?
A: Spice Market in Chelsea, and Dos Caminos, Morimoto, and Vento Trattoria in the Meatpacking district, to name a few. Spice Market has a magnificent atmosphere. The architect Jacques Garcia and the restaurateur/chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten brought hundreds of Indian artifacts to the site in pieces and we literally had to reconstruct the inside of the restaurant to resemble the interior of an Indian temple.
Q: Do you have a favorite architect?
A: I have great admiration for the modern style of Japan’s Tadao Ando. He has designed museums, concert halls, and restaurants all over the world. He designed Morimoto.
Q: When did you begin sculpting?
A: Ten years ago, as an anniversary gift, my wife gave me three months of sculpting lessons at the Old Church Art School in Cresskill. I studied there for two years, two nights a week, creating small terracotta pieces. I wanted to create larger, life-size sculptures so I moved to the Art Student’s League in Manhattan, where the space is much bigger. I’ll be displaying one of my small pieces at the League’s upcoming art show on May 15. The show is open to the public.
Q: How many sculptures have you created?
A: Fifty or 60 – mostly nudes or faces that interest me. My sculptures vary in size from about 12 inches to over eight feet tall. Some of them are displayed in my garden.
Q: What do you do in your free time, besides sculpt?
A: Ann and I are avid cyclists and typically ride 16-20 miles a day on weekends. The longest I’ve ridden in one day was 100 miles for a Leukemia/Lymphoma Society fundraiser.
Q: What’s your passion?
A: Travel. Ann and I are taking a barge/bike trip from Amsterdam to Bruges this summer. We’ll eat and sleep on the barge, but travel from town to town on bicycles.
Q: Why did you move to Leonia?
A: We were living in Park Slope, Brooklyn where it was impossible to find parking and carry two babies up the stairs of a four-story brownstone. We read an article in the Times about Leonia, which mentioned the excellent schools. Within a few months, we purchased our first home on Highwood. It was a Sears Catalog kit house, one of two on the street, and one of several in Leonia. We lived there 11 years before moving into this house.
Q: Is there anything noteworthy about your current home?
A: The previous owner was Robert Ludlum, the bestselling author. He wrote many of his novels in the great room off of our kitchen. Before that, we were told a succession artists lived in the house.
Q: What would you most like to see in Leonia?
A: I was impressed with the work that went into the downtown revitalization plan proposed several years ago. I believe there is still time to re-create a town center that opens to Wood Park, one that includes restaurants that can serve wine. We need to embrace change if we want Leonia to be a thriving community.
Leonia Lives 