A Timeless New York Apartment With Five Libraries HOUSE TOUR

You're here. Welcome to our New York City apartment. I'm Anne and I know that you're Homeworthy. So, welcome, welcome, welcome. You're watching Homeworthy, where we believe every home has a story. Hi, this is Anne Pine. I'm an interior designer with Macmillan Inc. and welcome to my home in New York City. What drew me to the space where we are, a midtown pre-war building, when the real estate agent brought me here it was a December morning about 8 30 and the sun was pouring in in this very room from the east and the sun just was so immediately exciting and warm and bright that I love this apartment. When I finished Sarah Lawrence College, I taught fifth to twelfth grade and then there was sort of a hiatus of having children and I took up writing short stories and I got those published with Knopf, which was a huge honor. My editor was the famous Gordon Lish, who got Truman Capote into quite a bit of trouble, so my mother was alarmed. And then time went on and I wasn't really too energized. Then 9-11 came and I was 50 then and I thought, what am I really going to do with the rest of my life? And so I thought, I'm going to do what I'll regret not doing when I look back at 75 and that was to work at Macmillan, where my mother had started six months after I was born in 1951, and which had been started in 1924 by Eleanor Macmillan, who then became Mrs. Archibald Brown. And I felt I want to get this firm to 100 years old because 2001 we were 23 years away and it seemed to me I was the right age to do that and I'd grown up with interior design my entire life and I loved it. I hadn't done it because I was a coward. I didn't want to have to get business from clients when I went to parties and I didn't want to be heartbroken when employees left to get married or have children or, you know, go somewhere else. And those were pathetic reasons really. They were the reasons of a coward because I've always loved interior design. So I said, and I've loved Macmillan, what it stands for. So I said, come on, you're going to do this. Well, welcome to my living room. When I look in this room, I feel like it hasn't changed at all in 40 years, but it's changed quite a bit. When my mother died in 2014, I inherited a lot of her things. Well, I didn't inherit them. I fought my brother tooth and nail to get them and we ended very happily dividing the way both of us wanted. And then I had also started to collect mid-century furniture. For instance, here is a Laverne table. Luckily I bought all this before it became a craze. And it's funny about Laverne because this coffee table over here is Laverne too. My mother was alive and she said, you know, it's funny because in the 50s we all thought Laverne was just terrible. We would never have it in a Macmillan room. She said, and now, you know, you're buying it all and I like it. So it's very historic to me that when my mother was starting out, Laverne also, Philip and Kelvin Laverne were starting out as she was starting out. And John and I sit here every night that we're not in the dining room and there's the TV. So I think it's very important to stick a big TV in a living room or you ain't going to live in that room. Maybe that's why a drawing room is one thing, but if you call it a living room, you got to have a TV and you got to have a table to sit and eat at. You got to have a sofa you can lie down on and room for people to live in. So I think I love drawing rooms. I love drawing rooms, but this is not a drawing room. So the chairs are Paul Evans. They are the most comfortable chairs you can imagine. And I wouldn't have thought of blue. This was meant to be a yellow and red room, but I love these chairs. I think I'll buy more of the fabric so that when it wears out from all these TV dinners, I'll have more. The sofa was my grandmother's in Mississippi and she died right when we bought our first apartment. So up came from Mississippi, all of her stuff. And I never would have bought a sofa like this. I would have bought something more loungy and so on. But actually it's great because more than two people really don't sit on a sofa very happily. If it's a party, they'll sit in the middle, but who wants a big sofa if only two people are going to sit on it because you don't have the real estate to put the other chairs around and the end tables and so on. And so I've always just, I love this sofa and it's very comfortable, especially as you, as you pass 35 years old, you like to sit upright a little more when you're talking to people and not be all splayed back looking at the ceiling. So it's, it's a goofy sofa to own now, but, and the Marshall field chairs are Mellon standard for a room because they have the curve back. So it's not an imposing thing that you're, you're banging into. Now my mother's things, oh gosh, well, the paintings, the three, three old master floral paintings, my father decided to go wild when he was older and buy these. And the one over here has Jesus Christ coming out of the middle of a rose. It's a very peculiar painting. And in her will, my mother gave, you know, this to my brother, that to me. And when we got to this painting, she said, sell it in big capital letters. So of course I didn't sell it. I, I, it amuses me so much this period, 17th century, where the whole, the disciples are all around Jesus and they're coming out of a wreath of flowers. It's so bizarre. And then a fun thing also that wasn't here in the beginning on this wall, there was one large painting and suddenly I have a gallery hanging. Well, the four on the right side are all by Aaron Schickler, who more famously than painting me and my mother or my husband or my son painted and daughter painted president Kennedy. And that was his posthumous painting that's in the, in the white house now. So the one on the top is my daughter. And I think she looks like Whistler's mother in the pose. And the one to the right of her is my mother. And she got that done for free because she got so many clients to buy Aaron Schickler's to hire him for portraits. He did that for free. And the one under it is me at the piano when I was 11. And there was one of my brother, but my parents didn't like it because they thought he didn't look tough enough. So they had to redo it with him bigger with a baseball mitt under a tree. But the first one was more adorable. It was on the back porch. And he has both of them now. I'm so mad because I nicely gave it to him when my mother gave both to me, but that's okay. But the funny thing is the little one is of John, my husband, also by Aaron Schickler. And we are the same age, 11, when they were done. His mother did not know my mother, hired Aaron Schickler to do his portrait. And five years later, because I'm younger, my mother, but age 11, hired Aaron Schickler for me. So that's our Schickler wall. And then further over are three Whistlers. And so I sort of like my daughter looking like Whistler's mother by Schickler, looking over at the Venice. I love those three. And those were things I bought in my rapacious mode that I had. And then this is my little Kunstkammerer moment over here. Little treasures, none of which were my treasures, but the boxes, I love Lee Vautrin. Well, look at this one. It's got a poem of Apollinaire as the book front, you know, as if it's a leather book, nothing much inside with the pages. I should have polished it for all of you. I'm going to put that back. And here's another one with a Villanelle poem on it. Now, let me see what I have down here. I bought at the Drouot in Paris. It's some kind of Louis XVI memorabilia, but I kind of like it. And then this little funny thing I got at the same time is a scrap supposedly from Marie Antoinette's prison cell at the Concierge. It's a scrap from the screen that protected her from, I don't know, the guards. I don't know if it's true or not, but there it is. And then I like to sit by the window over here. I don't know. It's not the most gorgeous setup, but I like to read the paper here. Let's see a little East Sun coming in now. Then my mother was always a tiny bit of a fraud. She claimed these were very, very, very, very valuable from Taumier, the early 19th century Bronze Dorée chaser. And so I wrested these from my brother thinking I'd made a great kill, but I don't think I did. This was in my parents' library. It's just a good centerpiece here. There's two windows, both on one side of the room, which is not my favorite setup for curtains because especially if they're dramatic curtains, you've got all this drama on one side and nothing on the other. However, I did want curtains here because they make the windows seem, well, you lose a little view, but they make the room feel higher. They really add verticality to a room, not to mention warmth. So I have at the other end of the room, to balance the curtains, I have this screen, which was split in two, which I also inherited from my mother. So I like the balance in the room of the two long reddish gold elements. And I think that's important. If curtains are on one side of the room, I think they should blend in with the walls, not seem a disruption because it's very hard to balance on the other side unless you have red lacquer cabinets or, you know, it's very hard. And I really like balance in a room. It doesn't have to be obvious symmetry like pairs, pairs, pairs, pairs, but balance, you know, you don't want to walk in a room and want to move things, you know, and I have friends and, you know, I don't, I'm sitting, but I want to get up and move things. And I just don't, I think that's not the right instinct in a house, even if it looks unbalanced, as long as you don't want to move things around, I think you're good. And I also like this arrangement where there's the center seating group with the ottoman. Ottomans are so perfect. An ottoman is great for the hostess because she doesn't have to get trapped sitting. She can get up, say hello to someone else, go into the kitchen, bring out more wine. A chair, the hostess in a chair, it's, you know, not to mention an intersectional where they're trapped in the middle. So I like this fluid thing. And then I like this arrangement of two here because it looks like two people are sitting privately talking or could, but they're part of the circle. You can kind of imagine the room being lived in as you are alone in it. And I think that's a great thing about certainly a big drawing room. You want to make it so your imagination peoples it, even if no one's in there. So you're not lonely. You don't want to go into your little TV room. You want to really be in that living room. And so now we're going to go to the room. Well, I told you I bought this apartment or got to get to buy it because of the east sun coming in this living room. But the true reason, which I didn't want to admit was so that I could have my own library. And that was the room that was missing in our other apartment. So I would love to invite you to my own library, which as it has turned out 40 years later is one of the five libraries in this apartment. So we will now go to number one library. So I gave you a little brief about this was going to be my room in this apartment and it has stayed my room. I do not allow anyone in here under pain of death, but my grandson just barges right in here and picks up every single thing there is to pick up and starts playing with it. And I just have a breakdown. But then I remember it was in this exact room when I sat at the desk because I wanted to be a writer right here, this desk and St. Bernard's ended elementary school each day. And my son, John, age six, seven, eight, nine would sit in one of these chairs and it had what do you call it spinners on it. And he would swing his legs on this chair. And I thought I'd go crazy that he was going to knock over everything in the room. So after suffering for I don't know how long, I thought to myself, take off the spinner on the bottom of the chair. And I've been happy ever since because the chair stays in one place without legs flying around. I started in this room writing my book of short stories in 19, well, 1982 or three. And I do keep this book close to me all the time. I write with many other books in the form of a person. It did have a nicer cover. The sun has done this little piece of damage. And this was a very exciting thing for me to write these short stories. And it was a little bit controversial because what does a writer write about? But what they know about, at least if they're a good writer, that's what they write about. And they don't have fake names. You know, it was my mother-in-law and my father-in-law and it was my mother and my father and my brother. And anyone who had a real name, because once I'd written that, I couldn't just change the names. It just felt totally fake. And I feel the same way about, I don't know how you all feel, interior design books that have the client, you know, the missus. It's just like ridiculous. Everyone in the world knows our names and our passwords and our passcodes. Who are we kidding? Just put the name and have it feel right. But I got in trouble for the book because obviously, well, my family gave their lives over to the book. They didn't care. But my in-laws, to a great exception, and it was problematic in a sort of superficial way, but it passed and we all stayed friendly. But I loved writing these short stories. I'm proud of them. I don't care if I only have two readers in the world, I'm proud of them. And I'm proud of the experience of not giving in and, you know, trying to falsify and make up characters. So, I feel strongly about that. So, the books, okay, these books have been with me all my life and they're predominantly paperbacks, which means that when I pull one out to read it, it breaks in half or a third. So, in a way, they're wallpaper, but in another way, they track my entire life. I have the ones up here that I bought with my mother. Summer reading, we'd go to the bookstore in Southampton and pick them out. You know, I've read probably a fifth of the books in this room, but I feel like they were part of my life, whether I read them or not. And the fifth that I read, I really read very carefully. All the shelves are the same, but this is my literary library. So, it has literature in it, poetry, some nonfiction that is literary. It has novels, it has literary criticism. Over here is mostly when I went to Columbia and studied literary criticism. On the right side, on the left side is poetry. Across the top there, a little bit, is the books I taught at Chapin for seven years, fifth grade, sixth grade, up to twelfth grade, and at the very top are plays. So, I try to keep it organized. When we bought the apartment, there were bookshelves here, and all of these trims and moldings were intact, and whoever owned it did a beautiful job architecturally. They even made this wall appear symmetrical, because it's not. The window is positioned too far on this side. So, they tricked the eye, and they hid with the curtains. This is a bookshelf I put in. They made it look symmetrical. If you go around the side, you can see. It's really not. So, I can never take these curtains down, because they're hiding the fact that the window is all centered. And the owners of the apartment, or their decorator, had the sense that it was more important to have this symmetrical with two bookshelves, than to have it off-center, and more light, and more view. And I think that people are very unwilling to give up light and a view. And what they create is a room that doesn't look right, or feel right, because, hey, you know, there's a view everywhere, and light destroys everything in its path. So, you ought to think twice about that. The architecture of the room, and feeling right in the room, is more important than saying, I have a view. Because you don't look at your view all that much, and I can see my view plenty good. So, this bookshelf, and I'll come over here now, it's also the literary paperback library. But this bookshelf didn't exist, and we built it. And Macmillan built it. I wasn't a decorator then, and tried to mimic the arc on the other two. So, we had books on this side of the room, too. But then, lo and behold, many years after that, books expanded. So, I built another bookshelf, over here, with the arc. And now I feel the books are all around. And I also, which is so important, if you have a predominant thing with a design, spread it around the whole room. And over here, this wall of art, or whatever you want to call it, it's like a bookshelf. It's like a scrapbook. So, I feel the whole room is, the walls, everything, are filled like a scrapbook. And by the way, who cares what color the wall? White is better for being the background, because the things are the wallpaper, the room. So, that's my theory about pairs of curtains and pairs of bookshelves on one side of the room. If you're going to do them, do them all around. And if you can't do them all around, mimic them all around. This is me and my mother, when I was in boarding school. This is me and my daughter, Elizabeth, and we're both looking at each other. In both, sorry, in both photographs, the mother and daughter are looking at each other. And this is Elizabeth and my mother, at a Central Park lunch. And this is my grandmother and Elizabeth. So, this is Elizabeth and her great-grandmother. So, these are the pairs of the Cheryl Pine ladies looking at each other at intervals of their lives. So, I left this little story here, but I took out the other pictures, because scrapbooks. I believe in scrapbooks. Get the pictures off the mantel. Put them in a scrapbook. Get them off the coffee tables. Put them in a scrapbook. And if you don't put them in a scrapbook, you better have them nicely curated. My favorite, unfavorite word. Nicely curated. So, they look like decoration, not like the same old pictures over and over and more and more and more. And if we have time, we'll go into my husband's dressing room, where there's more and more and more and no reduction. My mother, Betty Cheryl, got to be a very famous interior designer. But I want to just say, she wasn't a very famous one when I was four, five, six, seven, ten, eleven, twelve years old. She was very much the new kid on the block at Macmillan. And so, she got to be famous as I got older. And what I really learned from her was light and happy things. I mean, she just liked the word pretty more than she liked the word elegant. I've never, I never heard her use the word elegant. And I learned that, that there's, pretty doesn't mean frilly. It just means light, light and happy, clear colors, nice seating arrangements where people can be happy together, where they don't feel sort of stuck in a big sewing circle with one person talking. And it also means lighthearted about what goes on in decorating. Because if you take it seriously, you're going to have a breakdown. If you have a little light heart, you learn to laugh with your clients, and you laugh with the vendors, and you laugh at yourself. And it's a lot better than, now, I do get stressed out. I do have temper tantrums in my own heart all the time. But I try to think of my mother. And, you know, she said to me sort of a flip on Tolstoy, who said, I can't remember what he said, every, every happy families, all the happy families are all the same, well, my mother would say, all clients are difficult, so get used to it. And they are difficult, but all in a different way. So one is easy with the money, but can't make up her mind, or, you know, and it's sort of fun when you look at it as an adventure. And the client looks at it as adventure, which luckily most of my clients have. And friendship has been a part of my She also had a fun saying, which was, if a client isn't a friend when they start out, they will be when you're finished. So what's the difference? And I like working with friends, even though I do hear people say, oh, never work with friends. I disagree completely. It's so rewarding to work with friends, because they know you, you know them, and you do something together that as, as my friend Kitty Dishes-Al said, is better than either of you could come up with. And it has meaning to them that you've been involved. And it has meaning to me that I've been involved with them. So I sort of learned that from my mother. One nice thing about this apartment is the way it's laid out. You come in the door, there's a little vestibule, then there's a slightly larger one, the living rooms on one side and the dining rooms on the other. And there are windows over toward Fifth Avenue and windows toward Park Avenue. So in a way it feels like you're in a room with, with windows all around, nice symmetrically laid out, and light all around. So I also am a believer in dining rooms, because it's just great to get out of the kitchen, out of the living room, out of the mess, light some candles, and forget about the rest of the world. And if you don't do that, you can also put all your junk in there and shut the doors on it. If you ever have a junk crisis, a dining room, you know, children coming back from college with duffel bags and ice skates, and you can just put it all in there and shut the doors on it until you're ready to deal with it or they leave again. So I really think an apartment without a dining room or a house without a dining room is a mistake. You know, the eat-in kitchen, the eat-in living room. We have an eat-in kitchen and we have an eat-in living room, but a dining room by itself is so essential. And it's not old-fashioned, in fact. There weren't dining rooms in the 16th and 17th century. There were just little tables put around. So dining room is an invention of modern life, meaning after the French Revolution, and it's a great thing. And people should not give up a dining room under any circumstance, not to mention if you want to have a party. So welcome to the dining room. The first thing I want to say about it is it has become the leftover situation for my collection of late 19th century ceramics, furniture that didn't fit into our house in Southampton. I had a few of them in other rooms, but the dining room has quite a few of them. It has a Herder Brothers cabinet. It has British aesthetic period things from Lamb, from Christopher Dresser, from Godwin, the furniture. And then it has this table of Paul Evans, which is obviously not a late 19th century, with the glass top, which I like because I can see the rug, which I love, but I don't like because you see through it, and glass is difficult, and you see fingerprints, and you know, wood is so much warmer than glass. However, I have the table, I love the table, and that's that. You might see this seat cushion here. This is another thing as a decorator I go crazy about. It's when the chairs are too low for the table. So I can't sit at these chairs, even though I love them. They're late 18th, you know, sort of Georgian side chairs I bought. I love the fabric. I love the fact this looks more like a library table setup than a dining room. I love that because it fits with me, but when I sit here, I have to import a pillow. So, you know, please think about the height of the chair and the height of the table, because especially women do not look good when the table is around breast line. They do not look good. So get the thing right. Don't get a dining table that's more than 29 inches, and make sure the chair, when it's sitting, when you sit in it, when weight is on it, is 18 inches. If it has to be 19 inches first, fine, because that is the most comfortable relation, and it's so important. People may not know that things are a little off, but you feel it if the chairs are too low. These chairs are too low, and I know it, but I don't know what to do except bring the pillow in. So obviously this is a paneled room. This is how we bought the apartment, and it's very finely done. It's very, it's not just applied molding. It's really a paneled wall. You know, it's hollow back here, and so we weren't going to tear it out, and we weren't going to paint it white, because it's good. It's very nicely done, and it's great at night with the candles. I think there's, at Christmas, I put two trees. I have displays. I have a whole rigmarole. It wouldn't look good except in this, but this room is not a daytime room because you have the light streaming in from the west side, and then you have three dark walls, and it is a disaster to be in in the day. So you ought to think about a dark room. Don't try to make a dark room light. Keep a dark room dark, but don't make a light room dark. That's the story of my dining room that everyone loves, but three quarters of the day, it's a completely wasted room. We had a little curtain chitchat in the other room, and you might wonder why I have curtains here and not just blinds if there's no other window. It's because you can see both pairs of curtains, the living room and the dining room, at once. Maybe I'm kidding myself. I see them. Maybe I don't see them with any power, but mentally, I feel good about that, and again, I think the verticality closes in the horizontal, and these are fat windows, which is nice if you want to see every detail, but architecturally, fat windows in a traditional apartment are not great. If you're in a contemporary space, that's something. Contemporary architecture, where the proportions are different, that's different, but this is not meant to be that, so the curtains close in. They make this big window thing, and of course, I can pull this up all the way, and I have two sets of blinds. This is getting very practical. I hope you don't mind. I have two sets under here. I have, first of all, the blackout shade. Crank it down. Why can't I get this? When we go away, so that no light distorts all this stuff, and then I have, which I really believe in, even though you don't see it here, I have the woven wood, which filters the light at night, particularly, even though I have twinkling lights, which is great. Oh my gosh, we have this black mark over here. Okay, I want to show you. Okay, I forgot this black mark. Can you all see it? Well, you see those candles that I forgot to put the candles in? Candles are there, so my husband one night lit the candles, and of course, the shade started to burn, and he knew it, and he panicked, so what did he do? He pulled the shade up while it was still burning, and the whole thing burned up there, and I came out from my lovely bath. I said, something's burning. I wonder what it is. We hadn't cooked anything. We were eating kind of a takeout, and I discovered this thing smoking up under the curtain. So, you know, I do like woven woods, despite the fact that things can go wrong, because most night scenes are just dark, shiny glass, and they need something to filter them. Okay, so I can't go into the story of all the art in this room. It's very different from in the living room, because it is my late 19th century collection, but this one is very interesting, because it's painted by Simeon Solomon, who was from a family of artists, and he, in the late 19th century, and he was a Oscar Wiles, and very much in this aesthetic movement, and he ended up a very sad fate, because in spite of his huge talent to render things, he went way off the cliff with drugs, and he was arrested for pederasty, and all sorts of stuff, and his fancy friends, his aesthetic friends, deserted him, because, you know, he was an embarrassment, and he basically fell apart and died in jail, and the thing about this painting was, since I was collecting all that I could of this, this was appealing, and I also think it's beautifully painted. Little did I know, it had been lost for a hundred years, and for some reason, I found it, not me, but the dealer who found it, and it's been in two museum shows, one in Germany, and now it's, well, is going down to Philadelphia for a Simeon Solomon sort of discovery show, so he's a very interesting artist, and this is probably the most famous painting I have here, and all just because I wanted a late 19th century painting, and had no idea who he was, or anything about it, so keep your eyes out for this. So, we're in a slightly less busy space, because the kitchen's busy enough, and also, I love this layout. We redid the kitchen when we bought the apartment, it was all that we really redid, as I said, we left basically everything else, and here's some things I love. I love Corian, it's softer than marble or Caesar stone. If you clunk a glass down, it just doesn't feel as threatening that the glass is going to implode. People don't like, you can sand it if it gets, you know, the only thing you can't do is put a burning pot on it, a burning, burning pot, but I love Corian, I think it's very underestimated, and I'm just happy with the simplicity of this kitchen, no panels. Now, the problem with the floor is, number one, they lay the tiles a little bit crooked, and I've lived with it 40 years, I hate it, this little hitch in here, you probably can't see it, but the other more serious problem with it is, I like continuity in an apartment. I didn't want a 19th century kitchen, but I think the main, although I love the floor itself, which is American olean tile, it's a real jump from the wood floor out here, and I think if I had the energy to redo it, I would do like a gray porcelain tile with a little marble inset, I wouldn't have it so graphic. The only problem with that is this photograph over here, I'm a wannabe photography collector, and this is a big Matthew Pillsbury photograph of a kitchen with a black and white floor, so if I change the floor, I got to get rid of the Matthew Pillsbury, because the whole amusement of this to me is that it's a kitchen within a kitchen that has the same floor as the kitchen, and even if you don't think about it, you sense it when you look at the photograph. These photographs, certainly this one, are more, you know, this is Berenice Abbott's portrait of Eugene Agé, and it's a famous portrait, so I started out with Cartier-Bresson and the really traditional masters, and then about 30 years, I just got a few, because I didn't want to go crazy, actually, because I thought I was going to be a photographer, so why should I buy someone else's? Well, that was a real waste, equal to not buying Lalanne furniture, because I could have been a billionaire if I bought all the things at that time, but I didn't, and then 30 years later, I bought a few contemporary things, and Matthew Pillsbury was one of them, and this series, he had a tripod up for an hour, and the light in the photograph is from the TV, from the cooktop, from the open door of the refrigerator, and the blurs are where people moved around, fixing dinner, for the hour, so it's sort of a, I love it, because it has an intellectual thing for me, that it's about photography, and it's about the photography's ability, a still photograph to record movement, because you see the movement, you see the husband over here, he didn't move too much, you don't see the wife at all, because she was moving all the time, and it blurred out of existence. You can tell what did move, you can tell the pot moved, because it's kind of blurry, you can tell that the refrigerator in the inside is clear, and it of course has things, people ate in 1990, the Poland spring water, you know, it reflects the age of the people in the kitchen, the posters, it's just, it's a wonderful photograph, because there is so much in it, and I like that it tells a moving picture without being a moving, you know, a movie or a video, so it's pressing on the definition of photography, and I think all art forms should press a little bit, but that's sort of a tourist point of view. So the other photographs in the kitchen, oh and I might say I love black and white photography, I'm ambivalent about color photography in a decorated room, because to me it kind of intrudes a bit, it's jarring with the colors in the room, I'm not comfortable with it, and I know that's, I mean some yes, but I'm not comfortable with color photography in a decorated room the same way I am oils or watercolors or contemporary art. The photographs continue, and I do like wallpaper in a kitchen, and I like the cabinets not all the way to the ceiling, so the wallpaper can go above them or whatever, a bright pink color, because I like the idea that the cabinets are applied to the room, it's not a room of cabinets, and it's hard to link an area of art or wallpaper if you don't have a visual link at the top. If the cabinets go all the way up, you're looking at separate walls that aren't integrated. Now this clock is an example of my late 19th century collecting. Louis F. Day did these incredible, basically paintings on here, and you see the sun, it's a real aesthetic period clock, and I don't know about you all, but I love it with the mix of the photography. So, and I love this big odd-shaped island, it's a peninsula really, because all this I left it clean just so you could see. This is where I love to work, I've got the recessed lighting in the ceiling, and there's hugely great light and a lot of space for me to put out all my papers. Granted, I have to take them away, because someone else in my family doesn't want to have them in here, but I think a big island is a blessing for other activities. We never use the breakfast table over here. I don't know why, it's a repository for mail and dog leashes, so just the eat-in kitchen is not always all it's cracked up to be. I love the interaction with people in New York. In Central Park, I take the dogs to the park, I think, my husband says, what took you so long? Well, I just met people to talk to. I don't know them, I don't think I'll ever see them again, but it's just fun. Taxi drivers, the people I work with at Macmillan, vendors, curtain makers, it's just engaging all day long. I love to walk home and think about what I have done during the day. It just feels slower and quieter, and I think ahead, and I think behind, and that sort of feeling sums up New York to me. Maybe walking home at five o'clock and thinking, thank goodness I'm not in the country at five o'clock where it's pitch black dark, and I have to think what I'm going to do the next six hours of my day. At the end of the day, I feel like I really don't even need friends because I've been having fun in New York with people all day long. Welcome to my bedroom. It doesn't have any books because I don't believe in having books in a bedroom because I don't like a lot of people talking to me in the bedroom. You know, books talk to me. I look at them, my life comes back, author comes back, the controversy, so I'm not a book in the bedroom person. However, my book is on the wall here. This wasn't the book that got published. Well, the book that got published is on the wall, and I wish it wasn't. That was corny. I'd like to tear it off, but I don't know what's happened to the wall. So this is, the wallpaper is sheets of watercolor paper, and at first they were laid on. It looked like marble. The lines were very sharp, and so the painter and I, we tore it, ragged it. Here's an example of the seams. So I wanted it to look like paper, like writing, even though I was not allowing books in here. I wanted it to look like writing. So this was the book, but this was a book I wrote later. Can you see this little dim thing? And it was a book, sort of a memoir type of book, based on board games and playing jacks and all sorts of games. And so I would say, it's your turn, my turn, now we're doing sixes, you know, we passed, go. And I tore this book up because I decided, oh, well, no one's going to read this thing. So I tore it up and I glued it all around the room like a board game. So it is written in the form of a board game, but I actually made a board game of it going around the room. And this wall over here, I don't know if you can see, had some mold on it, so I had to remove the thing and put new paper. So I haven't gotten around to tearing up again. But I really like this idea of my life kind of quietly swirling around me. No one has ever come in here and noticed it or read one word, but I like it. And this lampshade here was another of my writerly things. When my daughter went away to school, I wrote on the lampshade quotes from all of the books she had read in elementary school. Great Expectations, Emma, Pride and Prejudice. And then I ragged some more paper around the top and the bottom to give it that paper look. I have Elizabeth Bennett. And I went into childhood, The Little Bunny, Demetrius Homer, The Hobbit, Macbeth. And these are the quotes. Ever the best of friends, ain't us Pip? You know, from these books. So I had fun with that. The Gray-Eyed Athena. In the great green room, there was a telephone that's from the Good Night Moon. So I love that lampshade. So these are a combination of etchings, engraving, stone printing. These are William Blake's from a book that he published, The Eclogues of Virgil, around 1800. So these little things were cut out of the book. And there was a group of young men, 20-year-olds in England, who were worshipers of Blake in his old age. And they followed Blake around the countryside. And then they, 30, 40 years later, did their own etchings based on his pastoral vision. So these over here are Samuel Palmer's. They're 1860. William Blake was 1800. Then I have a portfolio. I framed a couple of Calvert, who was one of the followers. Now, he did his etchings in the 1820s. And then he sort of failed. And then I have Richardson, who was another, the famous portrait painter of the later Victorian age. Richardson, when he was young, did too. This is Macbeth, and this is Jesus as a Shepherd. And I love these, because they're mostly all to do with morning and evening. Waking and going to sleep in the pastoral vision. I thought it was perfect for a bedroom where you put the sheep away at night, you bring the sheep out in the morning. The pastoral vision is all about that. And so in Southampton, I have a collection of the next iteration of etchers and engravers. So they are in the 1920s and 30s. Frederick Riggs and Sutherland, who was a friend of Lucian Freud. And so they're very different. They're modern, but they're the pastoral vision. So I actually have an important collection of these things that came kind of out of nowhere. Because I went to the Winter Antique Show in New York to pay a bill to the Fine Arts Society. And the man there had a show of prints. And I said to him, why would anyone buy prints? I mean, it's such a waste. There's all these, why wouldn't you want an original? And I said, oh, what is this? And I walked out of there having bought half of this collection in one second. So they're very magical. And they won me over to the value of prints, because I had completely thought it was ridiculous. You may be wondering about the bed. So it's kind of not like anything I have anywhere else, the cruel work kind of thing. But I thought it was very much in this sort of hand-done pastoral tradition of all of this. And also the bed, it's a low profile, which I like. I don't mind a four-poster bed, having a high mattress. But this kind of bed, I mean, you really want to sit on it. You want to put your shoes on. You want to talk to a friend who's doing something. I hate these high mattresses, because they put everything else in the room out of proportion. They put the bureau out of proportion. They put the side chairs out of proportion. I really like a low-profile mattress. See? Now, if I had a dust skirt, it's two to one. That's the right proportion. If you have a huge mattress, the box spring is tiny, and you can't put a dust skirt. And it's OK if you build a bed. It's OK. But I like this kind of setup, where the mattress is thinner than the box spring. And over the bed, you might be interested in a marble work by Elizabeth Turk. She was very young when I bought this, about 10 or 15 years ago. And I love it, because it's like floating in air. It's the very one thing marble doesn't do. Marble is so heavy. It's so ceremonial and pompous. And here it is, floating away, as if it's just a whiff of a cloud. And I think it's the perfect thing to put over a bed. I also admire that she can work in a form like marble and carve it so completely fragilely and delicately. It just looks like it's your thoughts at night, just floating away. And I love that it's marble, which is so rooted to the ground. It's not an airy material at all. So let's go look at my two last libraries. Oh, and by the way, there's another library, my photography library. You may not see any books here, but I'm going to show you where they are. They're in three places. Have you figured out where they are yet? Well, I'm going to use this to give you a tip. There are three of them. And so we've seen that and the photographs. Now we'll go into, you may wonder, I said I had children in this apartment. Where are their bedrooms? Well, they don't get bedrooms anymore or guest rooms. It's all about us being here and enjoying the separate rooms. This was my daughter's bedroom. And this is my, I guess I would say this is my fine arts library. Art history, decorative arts, and decorative arts. And these were the bookshelves that were in my son's room. I brought them in from his room and put them here because I'm very sentimental. I wanted to keep the same things. And there at the top is even the wallpaper that went around the border of his room when he was four and five years old. So I tried to save that too and not completely erase them from this apartment. This is a wonderful room to be in to do a little work at this table. And also it gives light to the apartment. And I have some pictures. And so this wall is a lot of personal art and fragile. I have to keep this shut a lot because of the watercolors. This is my father at Seminole. It's a pencil drawing by Peter Corbin and just so, Peter is a wonderful artist and it's so like my father. Then this was a little ink drawing of our old apartment. And you can see those curtains. Those are the ones I put out the window with the dust on them. It's the same curtains 50 years ago. And those are the same chairs we saw in that library. Now they have dogs on them. I don't know if you noticed, but they did have the fabric of the curtains. And there's what I don't like, the bookshelves on either side of the mantel and no other bookshelves. Now this was the house I grew up in in Southampton, a watercolor by artist Dora Frost, who's a personal friend. I like to buy art from friends. And Peter Corbin is also a cousin of John's, so it's good. This house was built by Carrere and Hastings who built the New York Public Library. They certainly don't look alike, but it's a wonderful picture of that house. My mother-in-law's three dogs. This is my mother, an oil painting by Aaron Schickler who we talked about before. My mother thought that it wasn't really Aaron Schickler. He got his son to do it, but I don't think she's right. She always had a conspiracy theory. And this little watercolor is by my friend Dora's mother. It's a beautiful watercolor. Here is my mother and this is the side of that house in the 60s. Her mother was a wonderful artist who just remained an amateur. Her whole life. And then these two paintings are by Dan Black who was quite young at the time, 20. I commissioned him to do my husband John with his pine manor. He's in armor. He's got a hockey puck. Where is the hockey puck? The hockey puck on top of a building. He's got golf clubs and a tennis racket on his back. He's got all the companies he invested in flying up in the air. And way in the distance is me on my typewriter, which I am over here. So that's his portrait. This is my portrait with my old electric typewriter, my camera, which is actually in that closet. A favorite dress I had. There's little John, my son, who's now 45. And there's Elizabeth, the little princess, my daughter, sitting on the typewriter. And the keys of the typewriter are important things in my life. Some of my friends with, well here is Stephen, my brother. And then way in the distance I have Brookie Hyde, Michelle Blake. Then I have MPS, the school I went to. I have a little photograph I took of my grandmother and Elizabeth, which you saw in the library. There's a little picture of it. So I really enjoy this. And there's John in the distance in his knightly attire with his flag. And these are books that I love, that I taught actually. Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, The Scarlet Letter, Jane Eyre, Pride of Prejudice, and so on. Now there you are. And this was done by my son. So this one furthest from the light for a reason is by Bernard Boutet de Monvel, who was an artist of the 30s, 40s, 50s. And he always, I have a book up there of his. He did very recognizable, they're sort of Art Deco, but this is a little watercolor and it's incredibly, well look up Bernard Boutet de Monvel because he was an incredible artist and very notable now. And I guess in the 30s, all sort of people of a certain group would try to have him do their portrait. That I think it's dated. No, it's not dated, but it must've been 1929 or 30, but this is a wonderful watercolor. And so this is my, and this is my daughter, a pencil drawing that my mother-in-law actually commissioned. And I said, well, now it's time to do my son. And she said, well, you didn't like the one of Elizabeth. And I said, what do you mean? I didn't like it. I loved it. But she never believed me. Once she thought something, that was it. So we never got John in a pencil drawing, which is too bad. So over here, well, first of all, this was the door into the bathroom here because my daughter's bedroom was here and my son's bedroom was through the bathroom on the other side. So it was what they call a Jack and Jill bathroom. But I thought, I'm not even using that other bathroom. Why would I have two doors to it when I can have more wall space? So I put this, I added, this was the original bookshelf and the desk, the bed was over here and the bureau is here. So that went out and I added the bookshelf for my son's room, but it overlapped the door. So the door is still there. We didn't actually take the door out. We just covered it. And this is my little collection of Staffordshire dogs that I've had since I was a child. It's kind of out of the way, but I love it. And some of them are valuable and some of the most valuable ones are broken and some of them aren't valuable. But I remember when I collected them all. So they're over here in a perfect little case for them, I think. And I'm very fond of this. So over here are just childhood pictures. This says Elizabeth's room by Macmillan Inc. That was our old apartment. This the babysitter gave to Elizabeth. It's awful looking. And this is a little thing I had growing up, a little picture frame, a porcelain ceramic picture frame, and you put little pictures in it. So this is sort of sentimental, all this. And these little things are not like those little things. This is all the Heron stuff from Scully and Scully, and I gave them to my daughter each year. And it's a cute little collection, but you know, it doesn't have... Well, I like it. And this little collection is quite interesting because one of my friends from childhood, her mother was a potter. You can see the dollar signs all over it and the development, the sort of speculative development with the dollar signs. It's a teapot with a spout. I guess it recalls Oscar Wilde's famous teapot that on one side it's a lily and on the other side it's a sunflower. And one side is a man and one side is a woman, but they're almost indistinguishable. They're unisex. So here's her Oscar Wilde teapot. I love that. I'm lucky enough to have three homes, and I love them all in different ways, but I think you can really only have one. And maybe it's the place you want to go back to die. I'm not sick or anything, but my mother, we were in Florida, which I thought was her favorite place. And I don't know if she knew she was sick. I didn't know she had pancreatic cancer. And she kept saying, I want to go home. I want to go home. And we hadn't had Easter yet, so it would have wrecked all our plans. And when she got here, she was so relieved. And that's what it means to me. Thanks for watching. Be sure to go to homeworthy.com for exclusive content, shopping guides, and so much more.