Friday, June 20, 2014

Howard Slatkin, Part II

House• June 20, 2014.

What to say of a single apartment so lavishly decorated that its rooms and their contents fill the pages of an entire book? “Fifth Avenue Style” (Vendome Press) by the designer Howard Slatkin was published in part because of the pressure Howard’s late mother put on the reticent designer to make a record of at […]... READ MORE

Friday, June 13, 2014

Howard Slatkin, Part I

House• June 13, 2014.

What to say of a single apartment so lavishly decorated that its rooms and their contents fill the pages of an entire book? “Fifth Avenue Style” (Vendome Press) by the designer Howard Slatkin was published in part because of the pressure Howard’s late mother put on the reticent designer to make a record of at […]... READ MORE

Friday, June 6, 2014

Benjamin Noriega Ortiz

House• June 6, 2014.

If you’ve ever been to a Mondrian hotel and felt like you were a celebrity, it’s by design—Benjamin Noriega Ortiz’s design—and not accident. It’s all part of the brand that he has helped to develop, apparently catering to our need to feel like stars walking the red carpet, making an entrance, all the while keeping […]... READ MORE

Friday, May 30, 2014

Alan Wanzenberg

House• May 30, 2014.

A long, thoughtful interview this week with Alan Wanzenberg, whose new book, “Journey: The Life and Times of an American Architect” (Pointed Leaf Press) chronicles the development of his design career. The book includes a long personal essay about his childhood, the times in which he was studying both at Berkeley and Harvard as well as his l... READ MORE

Friday, May 16, 2014

Caryn Schacht

House• May 16, 2014.

Caryn Schacht joined her mother’s design business when her mother persuaded her to give up on the film industry. The final humiliation of being fired from a production assistant job on a new NBC mini-series the night before the job even started made Caryn rethink her life. Apparently her mother, who has now passed, did not […]... READ MORE

Friday, May 2, 2014

Jamie Drake

House• May 2, 2014.

Even Jamie Drake himself seemed surprised when he told us he had been in the design business some 36 years (“36 years!!”) and he has packed a great deal in, from designing for Madonna and Michael Bloomberg to designing the interiors of a radiation oncology clinic in Florida and the City Clerk’s Office (aka the […]... READ MORE

Friday, April 11, 2014

Philip Gorrivan

House• April 11, 2014.

Philip Gorrivan is living out something of a dream at the moment since he and his family have moved to South Kensington in London where they will be for the next couple of years. The trick, he says, to falling in love with a city is to quit comparing it to your own city. He still […]... READ MORE

Friday, April 4, 2014

Andrew Jones

House• April 4, 2014.

By day, Andrew Jones works in finance but by night, and any other available times, he paints elegant—and elegiac—pictures of city stoops and their shadows. A member of one of America’s oldest families, he has an ancestor with the un-improvable name of Noble Jones. His own restored townhouse in the Village, which he bought in 1994, is [&he... READ MORE

Friday, March 28, 2014

Garrow Kedigian

House• March 28, 2014.

Of all the coolest people to have been the previous owner of your apartment, Fred Astaire must top the list—and the designer, Garrow Kedigian is now the current owner of this spacious, graceful Park Avenue property—a considerably different space to the charming walk-up featured in our previous 2009 HOUSE interview. We wondered if Astaire’s gh... READ MORE

Monday, March 24, 2014

Resort Life, Chapter XXXVIII: January 1970 – December 1970 Palm Beach + Boca Grande + Down East + Brittany + Ireland

Palm Beach• March 24, 2014.

On New Year’s Day 1970, maestro Leopold Stokowski was visiting Palm Beach. Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin was due for a vacation at The Breakers. Dina Merrill and Cliff Robertson were put up at Mar-a-Lago. Alvin and Lilly Fuller were ensconced in their new Chinese-style house with a ten-tier pagoda by the pool. During the holidays... READ MORE

Friday, March 21, 2014

Louis Navarrete

House• March 21, 2014.

We always love to hear of designers when they have had previous incarnations as something else and Louis Navarrete (pictured right), like a surprising number of designers we have interviewed, was once a dancer—a ballet dancer to be exact. Very glamorously he danced for the Ballet Monte Carlo where he was invited to the homes of people […... READ MORE

Friday, March 14, 2014

Andrea Anson

House• March 14, 2014.

We tracked down Andrea Anson the ancient way: through the White Pages, scarcely imaginable in this era, we know, but we were so taken with the richly-layered rooms in his SoHo townhouse when it was featured in Architectural Digest that we wanted to see things for ourselves. Bought in 1970 for $17,000 by Andrea’s late partner, Gordon […]... READ MORE

Friday, February 28, 2014

Dee Dee Eustace

House• February 28, 2014.

“I was the cheerleader with the 95 average,” says Dee Dee Eustace and there was something beguiling about declaring such a thing to a pair of long-time, utterly non-cheerleading New York journalists (us) … “Do you hate me?” she added. We didn’t. Newly arrived from Toronto where, as an architect and interior designer, she has her own [... READ MORE

Friday, January 17, 2014

Todd Black

House• January 17, 2014.

Todd Black’s resumé includes designing elaborate sets for Victoria’s Secret back in the day when the concept was lingerie-in-a-posh-English-country-house and working as a “below-gofer” at Interview magazine. Along the way he acquired a Masters in the History of European Decorative Arts from Cooper Hewitt and eventually struck out on his ow... READ MORE

Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Resort Life, Chapter XXXIII: August – December 1967 Down East + Palm Beach + Naples + Virgin Islands

Palm Beach• January 14, 2014.

By 1967, Brooke Astor had already made a name for herself. Following her short-lived five-and-one-half year marriage to Vincent Astor, and his ensuing death in 1959, she spent the next more than four decades dispensing as much as $200 million. As head of the Astor Foundation, she became New York’s most generous godmother. Having transforme... READ MORE

Friday, January 10, 2014

Christopher Stevens

House• January 10, 2014.

“This place looks like a souk!” claims designer Christopher Stevens of his warm, colorful little apartment tucked away in the West Village. We loved it, as we always do with apartments that have a vital sense of the person who lives there. In his early twenties, Christopher started out working in the development offices of both the […]... READ MORE

Friday, December 20, 2013

Matthew Yee

House• December 20, 2013.

Matthew Yee’s design style is summed up in his own words as “warm contemporary” and it’s certainly an excellent description of his Murray Hill apartment, which also doubles as his office space. Quite some time ago, we, somewhat memorably, interviewed his partner, Vincente Wolf, who told us that we bored him and that he’d quite […]... READ MORE

Friday, December 13, 2013

Stephen Sills

House• December 13, 2013.

“I hate that word ‘designer’,” declares Stephen Sills, “it’s such a made-up thing from the 70s when decorators were looked down upon, so everybody became a ‘designer’. A great decorator should be every bit as respected as a great architect.” And cheers to that, we say. Stephen Sills is respected. He is widely admired for […... READ MORE

Friday, December 6, 2013

Roy Hamilton

House• December 6, 2013.

Roy Hamilton is wonderfully British—just look at the photos of the silver teapot in which he served us Earl Grey tea—but then look at the way he paired it with delicate handmade ceramic mugs made by fellow potter, Nic Newcomb. The objects are each given new life through the contrast as can only be done by […]... READ MORE

Friday, November 22, 2013

Sheldon Barr and Tom Gardner

House• November 22, 2013.

Sheldon Barr and Tom Gardner have been together for nearly four decades and jointly run the Gardner and the appointment-only Barr Venetian Glass Gallery on the Upper East Side. It was not always thus because in past years they each pursued very different careers. Sheldon amongst other things ran a restaurant called Sybarite (“it was a success ... READ MORE

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