Social Diary• February 8, 2023

Society Portraits

The value and the legend of a portrait as painted...

Palm Beach Social Diary Autumn on Palm Beach

Palm Beach• November 7, 2011.

Palm Beach’s uneventful storm season has passed as the resort’s social-and-sport playlists get underway. The King Library’s annual benefit at the Four Arts attracted several hundred patrons. The Palm Beach Civic Association might not be holding its “Welcome Home Party” until November 30 but the group recently hosted it... READ MORE

Friday, October 28, 2011

Penny Drue Baird

House• October 28, 2011.

Penny Drue Baird is a seasoned, pragmatic, and extremely hard-working designer who seems to know herself and her own thinking very well indeed. “What I think my job is, is to make people happy,” she said—and most of the successful designers we have interviewed are similarly clear-eyed about accepting that this is a service industry. At [&hel... READ MORE

Friday, October 21, 2011

Marcy Masterson

House• October 21, 2011.

Poor Marcy Masterson had a bad throat when we interviewed her and a lesser soul would have canceled on us—she bravely croaked her way through. She lives in an apartment full of lovely antiques—we are still championing brown furniture at the HOUSE column. We’re also championing dogs—in fact we could probably do a companion column called DO... READ MORE

Thursday, October 20, 2011

Daheim, Part II

House• October 20, 2011.

Here are the Daheim barns, seen from the air in 1982. 25 years after I snapped this picture from a friend’s plane, a catastrophic fire destroyed 60% of the complex. A remarkable reconstruction project has ensued. It was the subject of a luncheon lecture delivered last week by yours truly to 300 guests at the 20th […]... READ MORE

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Daheim, Part I

House• October 19, 2011.

Here’s Daheim, my home in Millbrook for thirty years, in a photo taken 2 weeks ago. It’s a complicated looking house by any measure, and if it isn’t huge, considering others I’ve blogged about, it ain’t small either. Daheim was in ruins when I signed my first lease in December of 1981. It’s taken a lot […... READ MORE

Friday, October 14, 2011

Pintura Studio

House• October 14, 2011.

While wandering around the East Village after another HOUSE interview, I chanced upon what looked like an intriguing storefront but was, in fact, the fabric design workshop of Pintura Studio. I contacted the owners, Chris Isles and Ed Rollins and JH and I wound up paying a second, rather lengthy visit to the workshop, the factory in Red Hoo... READ MORE

Friday, October 7, 2011

Maureen Footer

House• October 7, 2011.

“I guess at the end of the day, I’m a romantic,” is how the poised interior designer, Maureen Footer describes herself – a romantic with an MBA, that is, hard won she admits for someone who naturally gravitates towards the arts. “It took some naïveté out of my view of the world,” she says. She once wanted […]... READ MORE

Friday, September 30, 2011

The Frick

House• September 30, 2011.

I first found the Frick when I was young in New York, just out of college in the early 1960s. Someone must have told me about it. I did not have a refined sense of art appreciation or history. I had a passing curiosity. The first time was a Saturday. There were very few visitors; you […]... READ MORE

Friday, September 23, 2011

Martha Glass

House• September 23, 2011.

Reggie Darling Interviews Martha Glass Ceramics Collector Back in July I had the pleasure of sitting down with Martha Glass, whose photograph regularly appears here in New York Social Diary, to discuss her passion for collecting ceramics. David Patrick Columbia introduced me to her and suggested that I interview her for NYSD about her ceramic... READ MORE

Friday, September 16, 2011

Oberto Gili

House• September 16, 2011.

Photographer Oberto Gili is a charming, if restless, man. During our interview at his wonderfully quirky West Village brownstone he smoked incessantly, picked at a loaf of crusty Italian bread and hopped around as we bantered about everything from the importance of curiosity to his Italian mother. His current project, “Home Sweet Home” (Rizzo... READ MORE

Friday, September 9, 2011

Ultra Violet

House• September 9, 2011.

12.10.01: We went over to visit Ultra Violet at her penthouse on the Upper East Side. As you can see, her front lawn is the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir, and she looks across to Central Park West, and north to the New Jersey Palisades, and south to all the rest of Manhattan and Staten Island […]... READ MORE

Saturday, September 3, 2011

Philadelphia in Palm Beach, Part I

Palm Beach• September 3, 2011.

We are taking today off to continue to optimize the back end of the new site. In the meantime, please enjoy Part 1 of Augustus Mayhew’s series on Philadelphian Ellen Glendinning (first published on these pages in 2011), who kept an extensive diary where she recorded and photographed the life around her family and friends; a chronological scrapboo... READ MORE

Friday, September 2, 2011

Philip Hewat-Jaboor

House• September 2, 2011.

Sometimes here at the HOUSE column, we feel we’re interviewing the last of an exquisite kind and Philip Hewat-Jaboor, an independent art consultant might well be one of those. We did keep accusing him of being an aesthete and he didn’t seem to mind at all. If he did, it would be hard to tell because he […]... READ MORE

Friday, August 19, 2011

Resort Life between the Wars: Part VII, 1940

Social History• August 19, 2011.

Resort Life between the Wars: Part VII, 1940 Chestnut Hill – Long Island – Lake Bluff – Saratoga By the spring of 1940 the nation was on edge as the war in Europe rapidly disintegrated any hope for peace. This segment of Ellen Glendinning Frazer’s social chronicle records pleasures and pursuits far removed from the everyday world... READ MORE

Friday, August 12, 2011

Sarah Story

House• August 12, 2011.

And so to designer Sarah Story, Texan by way of Japan, Singapore and California, and living proof of all the contradictions therein. Much of her design work is by inspired by the aesthetic of the Far East but her laugh … oh the laugh, it stopped us in our tracks … is it inspired by […]... READ MORE

Monday, August 8, 2011

Part VI: Palm Beach – Northeast Harbor – Palm Beach

Social History• August 8, 2011.

Resort Life between the Wars: Part VI, 1939-1940 Palm Beach – Maine – Chestnut Hill – Palm Beach Click. Snap. Flash. Philadelphian Ellen Glendinning Frazer was never without her camera. Her family and friends and the places where she lived and traveled became the subjects of her developing photographic craft. And when those friends happ... READ MORE

Friday, August 5, 2011

Susan Zises Green

House• August 5, 2011.

The first thing we noticed when we walked into this home in the East 70s right off Madison, is that it was just that: a home. There was a child’s painting of daubed, splotched color balanced on the frame of a mirror in the foyer and some petals had fallen on the front hall table […]... READ MORE

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Philadelphia in Palm Beach: Part V, 1938-1939

Social History• August 2, 2011.

Watch Hill – Middleburg – Palm Beach During the carefree summer of 1938 Watch Hill Beach Club and the Misquamicut Golf Club members sharpened their backhands and refined their putts, unsuspecting of the looming disaster from the late September hurricane that would devastate their idyllic resort. But however much the Great Hurricane of 1938, as ... READ MORE

Friday, July 29, 2011

Philadelphia in Palm Beach: Part IV, 1938

Social History• July 29, 2011.

Philadelphia-Palm Beach-Watch Hill cosmopolitan Ellen Glendinning Frazer focused her camera on the private lives of society’s most extraordinary personalities, making for an entertaining biographical chronicle of the faces and places often regarded as America’s social aristocracy. With her first husband Persifor Frazer III remarried and... READ MORE

Thursday, July 21, 2011

Philadelphia in Palm Beach: Part III, 1935-1938, cont.

Social History• July 21, 2011.

January 1936 Arizona Biltmore Hotel, Scottsdale January 1936 Montecito February 1936 Arizona Inn, Tucson February 1936 Castle Hot Springs, Arizona Hacienda De La Osa Sasabe, Arizona November 1936 Hindenburg PALM BEACH February 1937 April 1937 Luncheon at the Wolcott Blairs April 1937 A night class in photography April 1937 Du Pont house party, Newt... READ MORE

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