Boston Common - Niche Media - A side of Boston that's anything but common.
Issue link: http://digital.greengale.com/i/715599
photography by eric roth. opposite page: abigail gorden (morris, songbirds, skeleton); eric roth (albatross) 110 bostoncommon-magazine.com set design Oscar-winning directOr Errol Morris turns his fOcus tO gOld-star décOr with designer HEidi PribEll. By Lisa PierPont Both filmmaking and interior design are rooted in storytell- ing. It's a shared interest that turned friends Errol Morris and Heidi Pribell into collaborators. Morris—the 68-year-old Oscar- winning documentary filmmaker behind The Fog of War and The Thin Blue Line, as well as an up- coming series on Netflix—houses his production company in a sun- soaked, steampunk-styled studio in Cambridge sporting walls of books, creaky wooden floors, eccentric taxidermy (a monkey head!), fiery red sofas, aluminum doors, and vintage holophane lighting. It's cozy, intellectual— the kind of place you wouldn't mind pulling an all-nighter. Much of that atmosphere Morris credits to Pribell, the Harvard- educated, Cambridge-based interior designer (and one-time boutique owner and art curator) who produces a stylistic variety of residential projects at her eponymous design firm. Boston Common joined the friends for tea in Morris's home to discuss their common ground. heidi pribell.com; errolmorris.com This space seems full of stories. Heidi Pribell: That is the whole thing! Objects have stories and a narrative! Errol Morris: Yes. I always used to distinguish between symbols and fetish objects. Symbols always struck me as much weaker because they had to represent something, whereas an object has its own power. HP: Right. Objects are really so layered like that. [With] interior Objectives: The décor of director Errol Morris's Cambridge home revolves around objects, from pieces of art to cellos to taxidermy animals, a motley and marvelous mixture seen here in his music room. Space home