Masters Of Ceremony

News of the terrorist attack on the Brussels airport hits just as we’re scheduled to set out on a tour of Madrid.

- Pilar Guzman

U.S. Ambassador James Costos, who has the kind of blue eyes that seem to smile even when he doesn’t and a natural polish in a navy V-neck sweater and jeans, is unperturbed— if concerned—by the constant ringing of the phones. “Spain is an incredibly safe country; they do a good job in collaboration with the law enforcement officials,” he says, anticipating the security question that’s on everybody’s lips these days. “They have suffered their attacks before [Madrid’s last was in 2004], and they’ve learned from those lessons. They have a very keen sense.”

When we finally leave the U.S. embassy compound, Costos and his partner, Michael S. Smith, well into the third year of a three-year post, walk through the grand arcaded Plaza Mayor with near childlike wonder, ducking into the Mercado de San Miguel to sample the paella from one of their favorite food stalls and later into a new hipster-style artisanal-cheese shop in the emerging neighborhood of Conde Duque. With his floppy blond schoolboy mane and burnt-orange corduroy suit, Smith, who is best known in the interiors world for designing and decorating the Obama White House, seems to relish his role as enfant terrible—playing id to Costos’s superego, evangelizing for their adopted city with unscripted pith. “It’s truly foreign,” says Smith, who commutes from Los Angeles to Madrid for about a week each month, “like when you’re a kid and you watch I Love Lucy go to Europe.”