If he was not the crowning jewel of a third generation development family, one might think of Stillman as an enfant terrible building skyscrapers while a handful of years out of Duke law school then influencing world lifestyle issues at 40 something. “I started early in the business,” Stillman recalls. “Unfortunately, child labor laws force me to categorically deny the first decade of my career but, safe to say, at 18 I had more hands on experience than many talented union men achieve in their 30s.”
Perhaps the most design forward developer of his generation, Stillman’s visionary building, The Metropolitan [which he produced with Philip Johnson/Alan Ritchie] was hailed by the NY Times as “opening the Northwest corridor of the Upper East Side to luxury development”. In rapid succession, Stillman produced works with a Who’s Who of International Architecture, following Johnson with I.M. Pei, Sandi Pei and Michael Graves. To further push the design envelope, Stillman collaborated with a team of artists that included Wendell Castle, the reigning Dean of artist/craftsman, and American Master painters Alex Katz, Robert Cottingham and Donald Sultan, who collectively have had retrospectives at over 20 museums, including the Whitney, the Modern and the Smithsonian. A team builder in a Knute Rocknean sense, Stillman often comments ‘when you work with great people you get great results’.
It would seem more a certainty than an inevitability that an emerging force as reckoning as Stillman would meet an established force as reckoning as Donald Trump and in 2006 the inevitable happened. Rather than explore the uneasy physics that occurs when an unstoppable force and an immovable wall collide, Stillman, graced with Ivy League intelligence courtesy of Cornell, and Trump, instilled with Wharton wisdom, found the mutually beneficial common ground of collaboration. The result is the spectacular Trump International Fort Lauderdale, as lush a five star hotel as any resort has ever seen. “Roy,” Trump said summarily and with his trademark smile, “gets it. And not many developers do.”
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