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Street
vendor ready for the holidays. 8:10 PM. Photo: JH.
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Yesterday
was a mild and windy Wednesday in New York. Over at Treillage, the garden shop at 418 East 75th Street,
John Rosselli and Bunny Williams were throwing their annual Christmas
party.
Rosselli and Williams have their own separate sterling reputations
in the interior design business in New York and the great big world
out there. John has been in business for more than four decades.
The legendary tastemakers of the past half century (and even more)
are/were frequent clients and customers of Mr. R who is/was thought
to have the inside track on chic and/or great taste. God, the stories
he could tell, although he strikes me as not the telling type.
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Bunny
Williams and John Rosselli
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The man himself, who dresses like an art history
professor from
Princeton (I’ve never seen an art history professor from
Princeton, but you get the picture – I hope), is without
pretense or airs or anything resembling the fancy hoohah that inhabit
the
upper chambers of the fashionable ones. Someone who knows these
things told me once that Babe Paley always went
to John Rosselli’s
to have a look around when she was either feeling blue or just
wanted to find the coolest (my word, not hers) little table or
urn or fauteuil or lamp. And she’d find it.
Bunny Williams started out in her business working for Sister
Parrish at Parrish Hadley in 1966. Parrish was a taskmaster
and Williams learned well. In 1988, she struck out on her own and
the
rest is history. If you’re interested in that sort of thing,
you’ve seen her work in every major shelter magazine, over
and over. She’s represented in Jamee Gregory’s new
book, the party of which we covered in yesterday’s Diary, New
York Apartments; Private Views. Besides her international
clientele, Bunny also writes a monthly column for Elle Décor.
Her book, On Garden Style won the Quill and Trowel
Award from the Garden Writers Association of America.
In 1991, at the Chelsea Flower show in London, which
Rosselli and Williams were attending together – they are both passionate
gardeners, and have created beautiful gardens in New Jersey and
Connecticut – it occurred to them that it was very difficult
in this country to find wonderful things for the garden. Treillage
was born out of that mutual observation and they’ve traveled
the world since collecting unique antique and new garden furniture
and ornaments which can be found at Treillage.
I’m not much of an antique or gardening aficionado (I’m
an appreciator instead) but I got to know Bunny and John because
of their other passion – dogs. Bunny and Kitty Hawks were
the creators of Tails In Need and the Great American Mutt Show,
all of which promotes the adoption of mutts (or mongrel dogs to
you canine neophytes). Bunny and John have three or four. Or is
it five? (Kitty, I think, has two or three). You can learn more
about that by visiting www.TailsinNeed.com or www.GreatAmericanMutt.com
The most fascinating aspect of Bunny, to me anyway, is that she
is an inveterate reader (of fiction) and the first thing she does
every morning when she wakes up, is pick up her latest novel and
read (still in bed) for an hour. What a great way to start the
day in this heck-of-a-town. It may explain why she can have such
a heavy, work-filled schedule and always be a cheerful one. |
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Outside
of Treillage
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So,
Bunny Williams and John Rosselli had their holiday party at Treillage,
last night, as I was saying. The place was packed. The shop itself
used to be a blacksmith shop and stable (for horses obviously),
and then finally a storage area for John Rosselli’s inventory,
etc., up until about fourteen years ago, according to Howard
Christian, who manages the business. In the olden days,
when New York was a horse drawn city, far east on 75th Street
was where the richies housed their four-legged transportation.
No horses stalls were allowed west of Lexington Avenue, which
is why the Upper East Side didn’t develop its fancy far
east addresses until we were well into the automotive age.
Because I’m not a connoisseur, I don’t have the eye that causes the oohing and ahhing that
goes on in Williams and Rosselli’s Treillage, but it was going on last
night, even for the merry-makers, many of whom are the best of New York’s
interior design community (and a few of their customers too).
To learn more about their business, you can visit their web site: www.treillageonline.com |
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DPC
and Howard Christian
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Lee
and Cece Black
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Charlotte
Moss and Todd Romano
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Taking
a quick look around the shop
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Christian
Brechneff
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Tim
Lovejoy, Idelene Scherer, and Sandy Golinkin
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Ann
Ekstra and Colin Campbell
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Nina
Griscom
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From
Treillage, we went over 70th and Lexington Avenue where Nina
Griscom was holding her opening
night party for
her new shop “Nina Griscom.”
A beautiful
little corner store with two walls of windows, Nina’s
got all kinds of chic furniture pieces and accessories that she’s
picked up here, there and everywhere (she and her boyfriend Leonel
Piraino recently returned from a three-week buying trip
in India).
Whatwith all the adventures of Nina, chronicled here, there and
elsewhere, she’s basically a girl who likes to put those
refined aesthetic senses of hers to work. And because she’s
a popular one, she drew a crowd (and no doubt will continue to
draw a crowd), packing them in (literally) from 6 to 9.
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Nina
Griscom on 70th and Lexington
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| Lexington
Avenue in the 70s is becoming the new Madison Avenue (where smaller
businesses have been run out of the neighborhood by the corporate-size rents
for even the smallest spaces). That quality, taste and chic is now transforming
the new Lexington Avenue and Nina Griscom is adding her own special touch
of glamour and unique taste to the mix. |
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Annette
Tapert, Joannie Gong, and Barbara Liberman
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Hilary
Geary
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Mary
Meehan
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Carole
Holmes
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Tony
Urrutia
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Leonel
Piraino
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Mark
Gilbertson and Cece Dyer
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Nina
with her daughter Lily Baker
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Scott
Currie
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L.
to r.: Joy Hendricks, Robert Courturier, and Sandy
Golinkin; Nina and Joy Hendricks making
faces from outside the shop.
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