Guest Diary• September 29, 2023

Revenge, Redemption, and Refuge

Lee Fryd takes in the last couple events of the season out east, including a small dinner party for a new docu about a 20-something phenomenon; and a luncheon and lecture on Black female ornamental horticulturists. A fascinating history of style, color and beauty...

Alex Papachristidis

House• November 20, 2009.

Alex Papachristidis has a saying about life that is very apposite for an interior designer: You’re always walking into a dark room looking for the light switch. Once you’ve turned on the light switch in one of his rooms, there’s plenty to delight the eye. ‘I’m a more is more kind of guy. I love food, […]... READ MORE

Friday, November 13, 2009

Lisa Jackson

House• November 13, 2009.

Lisa Jackson, who took up design as a second (or perhaps third?) career after working in business and journalism, has designed homes for the likes of Renee Zellweger and Tory Burch as well as her best friend Vera Wang—all very commendable etc. but we really wanted to talk to her about was shopping—because if anyone has […]... READ MORE

Friday, November 6, 2009

Brad Ford

House• November 6, 2009.

Interior designer Brad Ford didn’t seem to mind it when we, somewhat patronizingly, called him ‘a little ole country boy’ – just because he grew up in Arkansas – a place that still seems to be his first love. He is easygoing and thankfully free of New York neurosis but has, nevertheless created his life and successful […]... READ MORE

Friday, October 30, 2009

James Bleecker

House• October 30, 2009.

Photographer James Bleecker is that Bleecker, or at least a member of the old Dutch family whose name is on the street sign. He credits the fact that he grew up surrounded by their narratives and their possessions for his fascination with the past and an almost willful turning away from the flat, unlovely pragmatism of the […]... READ MORE

Friday, October 23, 2009

Yesterday’s La Coquille Club

Social History• October 23, 2009.

Because today’s La Coquille Club has been so magnificently recast for nearly the past twenty years as part of The Ritz-Carlton Palm Beach in Manalapan, memories have nearly vanished of the original club’s ambience and attraction. By recalling its legacy with the few available images, the vision of its founder, Rockefeller scion, Spelma... READ MORE

Alex Gorlin

House• October 23, 2009.

In our lonely quest to find architects with a sense of humor, Alex Gorlin is our best catch so far. We kept drifting off message, but that’s what we like doing best and he was really game. He is, we must add, a very serious architect – the one selected by Daniel Libeskind to design his apartment […]... READ MORE

Monday, October 19, 2009

Washington Social Diary: Dinner With Mrs. Post In Absentia

Across the Nation• October 19, 2009.

The news was surprising, but at a formal dinner at Hillwood Museum the other night the guests were told it was the first such event there since Marjorie Merriweather Post died in 1973 and bequeathed the estate to the public as a museum. That’s the reason the organizers of the dinner, her grand-daughter, Ellen MacNeille Charles, and John Pete... READ MORE

Friday, October 16, 2009

Joan and Jayne Michaels

House• October 16, 2009.

One of the things we both love about these interviews is the element of the unexpected. And because Joan and Jayne Michaels of 2Michaels Design are twins and who are tall and lovely enough to have once been models, we knew that this was going to be an interesting interview. But then it took another and very […]... READ MORE

Friday, October 9, 2009

Preston Bailey

House• October 9, 2009.

Parties designed by Preston Bailey are fabulously expensive fleeting moments of fantasia involving torrents of blossom, crystals, temporary architecture and an extravagant daring that belies the serene, easy-going man we interviewed. He’s so warm and not at all flamboyant but we did see glimpses of a subversive sense of humor— he has a wicked... READ MORE

Friday, October 2, 2009

George Ranalli

House• October 2, 2009.

George Ranalli, an architect and Dean of The School of Architecture for City College, isn’t one for chit-chat. During the interview he straight away got down to discussing the business of creating buildings. For the past several years, he has been working under the radar of the of the overblown, overbuilt condo phase, diligently plugging away [&... READ MORE

Friday, September 25, 2009

Kathryn Scott

House• September 25, 2009.

Designer Kathryn Scott’s stunning brownstone in Brooklyn Heights rather silenced us with its perfection, combining Asian influences with antiques from Kathryn’s family and art by both her and her artist husband, Wenda Gu. They are both organized and thorough to a point that fascinated us. Kathryn physically learned how to do various skills such... READ MORE

Friday, September 11, 2009

Garrow Kedigian

House• September 11, 2009.

We immediately christened designer Garrow Kedigian’s Upper East Side apartment ‘Garrow’s Garret’, and, apparently like everyone else who visits, said how Parisian it looks. Garrow himself says he was going for ‘the abandoned mansion’ look and says that the French influence on his work is an unconscious channeling of his summer visits ... READ MORE

Friday, August 28, 2009

Jamie Drake

House• August 28, 2009.

‘I must have been a willful child …’ says Jamie Drake about his insistence on having black bedroom when he was 11 years old. The decisive and dramatic color for which he has later become known has a risk-taking quality to it, a kind of ‘do-it-and-don’t-look-back’ sense of daring. If that is his design philosophy, then his [&hellip... READ MORE

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Envisioning Palm Beach: The Addison Mizner Collection at The Society of the Four Arts

Palm Beach• August 26, 2009.

Architect Addison Mizner’s extensive library, volumes that span three centuries, and his design diaries — scrapbooks filled with sketches, watercolors, photographs and ephemera — are noteworthy aspects of the decorative arts collections at The Society of the Four Arts, reflecting Mizner’s influential status as a professional architect and... READ MORE

Friday, August 21, 2009

Miles Redd

House• August 21, 2009.

So we’re going to be talking more about you in this interview, rather than about design. We’re not going to ask you so much about whether or not you like furniture on the diagonal. You know, there are no absolutes … although there are certain things that I hate like glass tops on skirted tables […]... READ MORE

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

High over Palm Beach

Social History• August 11, 2009.

Late last fall a friend and I were motoring to Ithaca for the festivities at Cornell surrounding the dedication and DNA ribbon cutting of Weill Hall designed by Richard Meier, when my friend suggested we stop at the Glenn H. Curtiss Museum in Hammondsport, NY, on Lake Keuka. I hesitated, admittedly not knowing a byte about Glenn Curtiss. Fort... READ MORE

Thursday, August 6, 2009

Thomas Jayne

House• August 6, 2009.

This was really worth the five-floor walk-up! Why all the skulls and books about cemeteries – what do they tell you? I’ve always been interested in ritual and monuments and that’s how I got interested in these things. It’s one area that makes people different from animals because [people] bury their dead and there’s ceremony […]... READ MORE

Friday, July 31, 2009

Peter Rogers

House• July 31, 2009.

This past Tuesday JH and I went up to Kent, Connecticut for the day to visit Peter Rogers who has his country house on the market since he’s decided to acquire a second home in New Orleans (he has an apartment just off Sutton Place). Peter is a boy from Hattiesburg, Mississippi and evidently they’ve all got New […]... READ MORE

Monday, July 27, 2009

Washington Social Diary Remembering Old Iron Pants

Across the Nation• July 27, 2009.

It was 1970. I was a rogue teenager working a “cub” job in the Washington Bureau of United Press International. I preferred to work in a newsroom to being in school. Journalism was all I wanted to do or be. One evening, home from work, I dug into the new issue of Look Magazine. I bought it […]... READ MORE

Friday, July 24, 2009

Plant Specialists

House• July 24, 2009.

Philip Roche and Grahame Hubbard have been partners and co-owners of Plant Specialists since 2004. They run their massive, enormously successful landscaping enterprise from a block-long brick compound in Long Island City purchased in 1978 by the founders Tim and Dabny DuVal. The setting is phenomenal, an old iron foundry transformed into green h... READ MORE

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