Malcolm C. Eisenberg, 87, of Center City, interior designer and friend
"He was so confident as a designer, so sure of himself, it was so easy to work with Malcolm,” architect Cecil Baker said.
Malcolm C. Eisenberg, 87, of Center City, an interior designer and cheerleader for the arts in Philadelphia, died Thursday, May 18, of heart failure at his home.
Mr. Eisenberg left his touch on numerous Philadelphia homes with his spare, uncluttered style that at times borrowed equally from the old and new.
Cecil Baker, an architect in Philadelphia for more than 40 years, collaborated on residential projects with Mr. Eisenberg that were contemporary in style, although Mr. Eisenberg's range was much broader, Baker said.
When the pair tackled homes and condos in Philadelphia, Baker managed the overall architectural vision for the rooms, while Mr. Eisenberg handled the surfaces and furniture.
"He would take over and people the space with furniture and objects," said Baker. "He absolutely brought life to my architecture. He stated his priorities, and he went with them. He was so confident as a designer, so sure of himself, it was so easy to work with Malcolm."
Just 10 days before he died, Mr. Eisenberg and Baker went to the suburbs to visit a client. "He was going a mile a minute," Baker said. Baker described Mr. Eisenberg as "a gem, an elegant man."
He arrived in Philadelphia in 1956, a young man from Montgomery, Ala., by way of the University of Chicago, driving his MG into town and determined to look at as much modern art as he could, his friend Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker wrote in an appreciation. For the next 60 years, Mr. Eisenberg was a Philadelphia fixture.
Not long after arriving, he met and married Ellen Speiser. In 1960, they moved into the house that her grandfather Maurice Speiser had renovated on Delancey Place, a masterpiece of Modernist domestic architecture by George Howe, a co-designer of the PSFS building.
"The house was one of Malcom's special passions – not merely as an antiquarian project but because of his certainty that its elegant yet open spaces offered a model for living," Gopnik wrote. The couple reared two daughters there.
Mr. Eisenberg's career as an interior designer began in the early 1960s, with the founding of his firm, Design Three, at 17th and Walnut Streets. It soon made him one of the leading design figures in Philadelphia and beyond, responsible for early interiors at Muhlenberg College and Pennsylvania Hospital, and later the inside of Ristorante Dilullo Centro near Broad and Locust Streets. His website beckoned: "Let us do the work for you."
"Almost every person with whom he worked became a dear friend," said daughter Martha Speiser Eisenberg.
He liked to stay ahead of the curve. In early 1971, when his firm became one of the first in the city to switch to a four-day work week, he dubbed the experiment a success. The staff worked from 8:30 to 6:30 Monday through Thursday, and turned on the answering machine Fridays. Morale went up, absenteeism down. "TGIT, or Thank God It's Thursday," he told the Inquirer on April 18.
In the mid-1960s, Mr. Eisenberg was one of the key players who struggled to bring repertory theater to the city with the founding of the Theater of the Living Arts on South Street. He and the company's artistic director, Andre Gregory, became friends and collaborators, and though the theater closed sooner than its admirers would have wished, his friendship with Gregory endured.
After his divorce from Speiser, he met Sara Eissler in 1987. They became companions and then married in 2008.
In the mid-1990s, he spent a month each summer with Gopnik in Paris. "In the years that followed, he brought one friend after another to share the French capital and learn it as though it were a home -- becoming a permanent enchanted usher from Philadelphia to Paris," Gopnik wrote.
Mr. Eisenberg loved sailing, and spending time with his grandchildren in Wellfleet, Mass.
He was "a peerlessly engaged friend," Gopnik wrote. "What his friends and family will miss most is his constant, inclusive empathy."
In addition to his wife and daughter, he is survived by daughter Erica Speiser Eisenberg; a sister; and four grandchildren. His first wife died in 2015.
A life celebration will be private.
Donations in his name may be made to the Southern Poverty Law Center via https://donate.splcenter.org/sslpage.aspx?pid=463