How Ellie Filled Her Timeless New York Home with Treasures from Travel | HOUSE TOUR

Hi, Homeworthy. I'm Ellie Kullman. Welcome to my New York City apartment. You're watching Homeworthy, where we believe every home has a story. Hi, I'm Ellie Kullman, founder of Kullman and Kravis, an interior design firm. Welcome to my home in New York City. What drew me to this home, after I looked at about a hundred apartments, was I walked in the door and I was so impressed with the architecture, with the height of the ceilings and the flow of the rooms from room to room and the architectural details. The building was done by Rosario Candela back in the 30s. He's always been considered the dean of American, or especially New York City, domestic architecture. He arrived from Sicily as a young man in, I think it was like 1929, with only $10 in his pocket. Somehow got to Columbia Architecture School and managed to do so well that he put stanchions around his desk so nobody would steal his ideas. And I feel so lucky to be in one of his apartments, which are just wonderful to live in. Here we are in my entrance hall. We were so lucky to find this apartment because it's a duplex and this was a wonderful thing to have when we had three very boisterous children growing up in the apartment. I think what's amazing about the architecture is, first of all, the 10-foot ceilings, the magnificent moldings which were done by Candela, and this very graceful staircase and the curve on it. What I've changed though in an effort to modernize the apartment was, for example, this is a beautiful herringbone wood floor, but I added this stencil that I saw in a palace in St. Petersburg, Russia. So lucky to go there before what's going on today, and I recreated it in my own home. I also changed the stringer on the stairs. The stairs used to be oak paneled like the treads. It was kind of dark and gloomy, so I changed that to white. I also added the chair rail, which was very important because it grounded the artworks that I've put going up the stairs, but also it allowed me to put a bright color underneath. So all in all, it's still the original architecture. What we like to say at Coleman and Gravis, subtle transformations. Some not so subtle. Plastic surgeons say that also, by the way. When you come into our apartment, the most prominent thing you see is this Indian sculpture of Vishnu from the 7th century. It's a very interesting time in India because they've been influenced by Alexander the Great. And so you can see that this deity has classical characteristics, which is unusual for India. But if you come around the room with me, this is Chinese terracotta from the Tang Dynasty, which is 6th to 9th century. And here we have, this is Cambodian, and it's one of those heads that revolves, which you see so much of, for example, like in Angkor Wat. And then here is one of my most prized possessions, is the photograph of my husband and I. We got married a second time in Japan in full Japanese costume because our Japanese friends thought we needed to do this as our going away party. Here I have a really wonderful Louis XVI, 18th century chest. And I had a very classical mirror on top of it. And it really was kind of like, not as exciting as putting this Murano 20th century sapphire blue mirror on top of it. And I just love how the artist, for example, Kuniyoshi, he's a very interesting artist who lived in America, but was Japanese. The Krolls, Arthur Lorenz. Then going up the staircase, we have a little bit of everybody you can imagine. But I love that they're all talking to each other, even though they're from different periods and different times. My love of antiques started with me when I was actually in college. I was a history major. And I love the stories that all these antiques tell. I also love how they talk to each other. That's a big thing with me. And so I've always been interested in antiques, but I didn't want my house to look like a historic home in any way. So now I've introduced the contemporary art as a foil for it. And I think it's a much more interesting recipe, so to speak. So now I'm going to show you my living room. And as you could probably tell by what I'm wearing and what the walls are, my favorite color is red in absolutely every permutation of red that you can imagine. These walls are really interesting because this is done in a Venetian stucco, which is where you tint the plaster. You trowel it onto the walls with a big, big knife. And it gives you this iridescent quality. But to add to it, I added an overwash of gold, which you can't have too much gold as far as I'm concerned. So one of my most prized possessions is this Japanese screen. It's a view of Kyoto. It's a very repeated motif in Japanese art. This is 17th century, but it goes way, way, way back. We were living in Japan, and we wanted to buy one thing that was going to be emblematic of our time there. So we scraped together the money that I had made teaching English, which was very little at that time, and we bought this screen. First, we called my husband's parents, and we said, can we spend a few thousand dollars on this? And they said, that's fine, but you have to realize that there's no apartment in New York that'll have a nine-foot wall to accommodate the screen. Anyway, I feel so lucky that this large wall did accommodate the screen. And this is, I guess, really one of the few things that have been here since day one of living in this apartment. We moved in in 1986, but we bought it in 1984. In those days, there were no summer work rules, thank the Lord. And I was just feeling my way as interior designer, so it took a little more longer than it should have. But now I think, first of all, you couldn't do this now. You can only do construction in the summer in these buildings, so you have to be uber, uber, uber organized to get something done in even sometimes two seasons. Here's a little takeaway for the people that are watching this video. It's always a huge issue what to do with three walls that are on the same visual plane. It's really hard to put a mirror over the mantle and then find two artworks that are sympathetic to each other in size and style on either side. So we've decided early on that it was much easier to have a pair of mirrors on the smaller walls and then put a painting stage center over the fireplace. So this is this painting is by Max Weber. It's actually some of his late work. He did start in the teens. He was an early modernist, but this one's a little bit later, and I love it because of its connection to cubism, and I just fell in love with it. The mantle was something that we did source outside of the Candela original vocabulary, and I bought this in London, and it's a magnificent Regency carved wood mantle. I like having two seating areas because, first of all, if you have a typical dinner party, it's 12 people, right? As long as you're going to the trouble, let's have 10 or 12 people. But I also have a gigantic family. I can't even tell you how many people are in my side of the family alone. So the more people that I can accommodate here, the better. And so there's a cozy group for sitting around the fireplace. There's another group here under the screen, which is very nice if you're just two people having a drink or something. And then there's a supplemental space over here between the two Park Avenue windows, which I also love. And of course, this Adolph Gottlieb from the 60s is really iconic. Love it. But our company is all about details. So what you're going to see here, if you look at things like the throw pillows, these were just done in Paris, literally, for the room. I always have to tweak something, you know? And so these came like this week. And the curtains we did in India with Lesage, the very famous company that did all the Paris couture since really, they just celebrated their 100th anniversary since the 20s. But now they've branched out into home furnishings as well. But everything is about the details. For example, this is just not a plain linen velvet. It was hand stenciled and then hand painted and then brushed with gold by another vendor in Paris. It's these details that make what we do so endlessly interesting. Well, photos are very important. And I'm always adding photos to all of our interiors. Some people don't like to have them in living rooms. I don't understand that this is your history. This is your life. So there's me as a newlywed. I always like to look back on that. And of course, I'm always happy when somebody recognizes me now in the street. And it's under a de Kooning. So that's a nice mixture, right? Another thing that I'm really devoted to is candy. And I don't think a home is a home. It's okay to have family pictures. It's okay to have books that you're interested in. But without candy, I don't think a home is truly alive. So I always find places for candy, fun bowls for candy. And you'd be amazed how quickly the candy is gone once I have it here. So again, working on the idea of eclectic nature. So this is another Tang Dynasty horse, right? More horses. These are Florentine. These lions that are probably 16th century. It's a bronze French 19th century lion. And this is a really wonderful thing. This is from India. It's really important if you're interested in antiques to go to as many places as possible. You always find something if you're interested in antiques. And it's really wonderful for interior designers too, because it's a ready made. It's instant gratification. There's so much that we do in terms of like specking special pieces of furniture, which I have, and you have to have it throughout a home. But having something that you see, you love it, and you can try it the next day is a gift. I'm on the founding board of Friends of Florence. And I always noodle around the antiques stores, both in the left bank and the right bank in Florence. And I saw these, which were probably originally curtain pelmets. And what's interesting about it is that there were only two. But because I have a third opening, the one that opens into the dining room, I had to get my great artisans to make me a third. And I defy anybody to tell me which is the real and which isn't, because I don't even know at this point. And they did such a good job copying it. So these are Louis XVI, what's called style. It's when a later period copies the style of an earlier period. And these were done by Janssen, the great design studio in Paris. And they're probably from the 20s or 30s. But they were made for a rich client in South America, because they have a stamp of Janssen in South America. But what I do love is this very traditional form. This is a Florentine lamp. These are Tang Dynasty horsemen. This is a Chinese export 19th century piece of Femi Rose. And then this Pat Steirer, very, very modern painting. To me, that's a dialogue that's interesting. We believe that when you go into a home, two things. It should tell you about the people and what their interests are. That's why I don't understand this idea of wholesale decorating, where you just do the whole thing all at once. It has to tell you about their history. And also, it creates something that's alive, a conversation that's alive between various things. So we've got Florence, China, China, South America in the style of France. I mean, I love that. That's how we should all live together, in peace and harmony. I could not have afforded a pair of 18th century Japan commodes, but these 20th century ones look pretty good to me. One other big change in the house is introducing this Austrian chandelier from early 19th century. I have a lighting fixture in absolutely every single room that we work on. You can't use down lights because they make women look horrific, especially at my age. But look at the difference, the cheerfulness of adding this, I think it's 12-arm Austrian chandelier, right? It just brings the room alive. One of the big items for design is the coffee table. Coffee tables were not invented until after the Art Deco period. So we're constantly coming up with designs for coffee tables because today, I don't know where I'd put the guacamole if I didn't have a coffee table. So under my candy, you can see, I found these incredible marble panels in Paris. They're probably Italian. And then we designed this table to accommodate the panels. This conversely, this other coffee table was based on a door that I found that the dealer told me was from Sri Lanka, but I've never been there. But anyway, I thought that the geometric forms were so interesting. So we had the panel, we had the top, and then we designed the whole table to go with it. So coffee table is very important in today's world. My origin story is quite unusual. I spent about 10 years, first of all, my husband and I lived in Japan for two years, and that was an enormous influence on my development as an interior designer. I always say that when you spend four hours arranging five chrysanthemums with an ikebana flower arranging teacher, it really sharpens your aesthetic. And that was my background. But when I got back from Japan, I bounced around from Columbia Graduate School in Japanese, then to working at Japan House Gallery, then to working at the American Cinematheque. I've always loved film. And then finally, my late partner, Hedy Kravitz, and I decided that we were going to write a screenplay about her divorce. We didn't know anything about screenplay writing, but we bought some books, and they explained that plot point one was on page 30, plot point two was on page 90. And we wrote a screenplay about her divorce. We submitted it to a dear friend, Stanley Jaffe, who was then a producer who had won an Academy Award for Kramer versus Kramer. He read it, and he said it was absolutely the worst thing he had ever read in his life. I was so crestfallen because I'd tried so many other things in art and film. And I said, what should I do when I grow up? And he said, I want you to decorate my apartment on Park Avenue. I've just fired my third decorator, and I love your homes, which I know both of you did yourself. Come and take a try at it. Anyway, it was life-changing for me. I was able to use the curatorial skills that I used at his apartment. For example, he had a large china cabin, and he said all the three decorators brought me all this stuff for the cabinet, but it made no sense. And I immediately had the idea, let's talk about, because he had a very serious English furniture collection, let's talk about the idea of how the English copied the Chinese. So I researched and found a lot of pieces of china that were based on Chinese originals. And we showed it to him one day, and he said, great, done, let's do it. So that was exciting to have that kind of instant gratification. He was our first client, October 1st, 1984, which was just the time I moved into this apartment. Lots of other friends also signed up to become early clients. Hedy and I used to have this habit of after a dinner party and some wine, we would go into somebody's living room and rearrange the furniture. It's kind of our favorite thing to do. And so we took off. We originally had one assistant. She was a ballerina, but since then, we've grown to a larger staff, and we work all over the country. And we've been very lucky to be respected in the industry and to have a really interesting career for all of us. Hey, welcome to my dining room. This dining room has the very first thing I bought for my very grown-up apartment. And it was this Chinese wallpaper that goes back to 1770. And you can find wallpaper like this at the Met or at Winotour. So two really important collections. And it was sold to me with the idea that even though I needed 76 linear feet of wallpaper, they only had 40 feet. But they convinced me, they, Gracie, the great company Gracie, convinced me that they could match seamlessly the style of the real paper with the reproduction paper. And you know what? They did. So that was really lucky. I love how this introduces you to village life in China. And this is very interesting as a companion piece for the screen in the living room, because that is Japanese and this is Chinese. And I just love Asia. I don't know what to say. This is my Buddha, which I love. This Buddha is very early. It's 1300. And I find it so mystical to look at it. And it's very nice because I sit there to have breakfast and I look at it and I'm just very, very, very pleased. But my husband, as you can see, loves wine. We have wine decanted, more wine decanters than we can use, although we use a lot of wine. So my husband and I lived in Japan when we were first married, year two and year three. And it was very exciting for me because my parents had not let me go to boarding school away from New York. I had to go to Barnard because I lived in Brooklyn and it was just a cab or a subway ride away. And so when my husband proposed and we knew he had to go to Japan, I was like, okay, fine, fine, fine, fine. So I fell in love with Asia. I didn't really know much about it because at that point in time, we all had Sony transistor radios. I thought it was going to be a completely westernized place. It was not at all. And the first day he left for work and I was left trying to get something at the coffee shop. And I said, I'd like a Coke. And they looked at me like I was crazy. So finally, after six months of going to Berlitz every day on my own nickel, I learned enough Japanese to get around quite well. And I've continued my interest in my passion for Japan ever since. And when we have a chance to travel, we'd love to go else elsewhere in Asia. For example, we've been to China many times. We've been to Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Myanmar, just wherever. And I love touching all these cultures. So this is a, it's called a Tansu and it was used to transport garments from one end of Japan to another. And I think that the lacquerware here is so amazing. And also look at the metalwork. They have such a high degree of artistic skill. It's really incredible. And I, this is another one of my embroideries that we did with Lesage. Not in Paris, they're from Paris, but they have a big place in Chiang Mai in India. And it's amazing how we can send them the fabric and then they just embroider it and it's perfection. This is a very classical dining table and a sideboard. So I had to liven this up a little bit because that would have been like very boring. I used to have George III shield-backed chairs, but then I saw these at auction at Sotheby's and I was like, I just need a little gold here, make it a little more glamorous. So to augment that, because I'm only on the second floor here, I glazed the ceiling in a gold wash. And what I love about it, it's not just the light fixture that lights up on it, but if you see there's like reflections of all the light. And this is a Louis XVI chandelier. English, English, French, French. That's English. This is Regency. It was a collector's cabinet for coins. Okay, so let's talk about mirrors. Mirrors are incredibly important in interior design and it's not for vanity. It's not because you want to look at yourself. Elsie DeWolf, the first woman interior designer, dictated that every room needed to have a mirror. The reason is that the mirror augments the light quality in a room. And for me, light is everything. So I started with a very classical convex Regency mirror here in my first incarnation. It was a bore. Getting this mirror that's so much larger has augmented the light quality of the room so much. And I love how it reflects back to the living room. You can see the Adolf Gottlieb in the mirror. Mirrors are important. So right off the entrance hall and the living room is my library. And that's one of the great characteristics of Rosario Candela's architecture, that you can rotate around the rooms, which means that you're never in a dead spot. And so you can go to the library from the living room or you can go from the hall. Very wonderful when you're having a party. Nobody's stuck. Anyway, so the library, which is originally burgundy, because I had this idea early on that libraries had to be dark and moody, was in retrospect a little depressing. So now the walls, which look plain blue, are not really. It's a triple glaze. We started out with a layer of like a baby blue paint, and then we glazed gold on top of it with a stipple brush. And then we added another layer of the blue. So what's great about decorative paint is that you don't get what is called dead walls. All the walls vibrate and have, you know, the color changes as you walk through the room and as the day changes. So that's one important thing is the blue. I also added a lot of white here in terms of the woodwork to make the room lighter. I'm only on the second floor. This room I always use as my laboratory for discussing what we call layered lighting. You can't have too many sources of light in a room. This is like critical. So we start with the overhead light. That's the biggest. This is actually a Polish chandelier. I'm not sure I knew how the dealer figured that out, but it's Polish. And then we have lamps, right? Then we have lamps. Then we have sconces. For example, I have the sconces here on either side of the convex mirror. Then we have picture lights, which illuminate the art. Then we have bookcase lights, which are very important because they wash down the book. Bookcases are so important. I can't even explain how important because it's not only what you've read and what you think about, but it's also what it adds to your life. Like it's so interesting for me. And then the only time I ever use a down light, only time, is to illuminate a work of art. In this case, an Ellie Nadelman sculpture, neoclassical sculpture, which was one of the last things I bought in the apartment. But I do love it. And it's on a base that turns so you can see. That's actually a prettier angle. Anyway, so that's seven sources of light. It's pretty amazing. Oh, and I forgot. Come look over here. These are called, we call them happy lights, and they're lights at the top of the window. So at night, you know how at night windows become just a black piece of glass? With this light, it gives a nice wash over the windows. And I think that's just a great thing. And I have it in all the rooms downstairs, which unifies the entertaining space also. So here again, we're talking about the conversation between art periods. And here we have Kenneth Noland, Warm Reverie from 1962. It's so meaningful to me because not only did I know him, but it's also all about color. And that's what I do every day in life is I work with color. But I love how the circle of the Noland repeats the circle of the convex mirror. That's a nice dialogue. But then again, look at this. Here we have two 19th century works of art, William Harnett and John Frederick Pitot. Again, these things could not be more different in their periods, including my Avery from, this is one of my most cherished artworks too, from the 1930s. I just love everybody, everybody, as they say, talking. My advice is really simple. Buy what you love. And even if you don't, at the beginning, understand the connection, there's a reason why you liked X and Y together. And that's going to be meaningful to you going forward. And it'll work. It'll absolutely work. And I think my apartment's a study in that. Books are so important in how you display them. People just smush their books into bookcases, generally speaking. And that looks very untidy. So I like to introduce some glamor to them. So here I introduced two things. Delft porcelain, which was primarily 18th century, made in England and in Holland. And then this is something that references my love of Asia. These are building blocks from a temple in Cambodia. And I think they're just fantastic. So I always try to have two things in addition to the books, something flat and something that's not flat. But you can do more than that. It just has to feel cohesive. So when you look from wall to wall, you're not seeing a different recipe. You're seeing a symphony of recipes, hopefully. So the library was burgundy, Florida ceiling. And I had an agra rug. So you can see I'm always using antique carpets. This is a Tabriz from the 30s. Very unusual with this light blue color, which of course gave birth to the color of the walls. But I had an agra carpet. I was obsessed. I love red. I was obsessed with rubies at that point. And it was a ruby-grounded carpet. And then it gave birth to ruby walls. And it was very pretty, but it was just a little claustrophobic for me. So when we redid the apartment with John Murray, we added this dado in the white, which was a good foil for the walls. We didn't have to paint everything the same color. This was our very first hand-sewn curtain cuff. Being in the business now for 40 years, just buying a tassel fringe doesn't do it for me. I need to do something that's unique and one of a kind. After all, what we do is so expensive. We want to give our clients something really special. So we drew this out. And then we had, this was done not by the people in Paris or the people in India. This was done actually by a workroom in New York. So it's applique-ed, right? The blue is applique-ed, and then it's embroidered, this floral motif. And then you put it on like a curtain trim on the curtain. See, in the later ones that we did that we just saw in the other rooms, we grew up more adventurous and went right onto the curtain fabric. The tables are Regency desk. This is actually something interesting for people perhaps. Desks are always a problem like this. A partner's desk is nice because you can both, two people can sit at either side. But think about how many legs you would have if you had legs on this desk. You would have 12 legs. So having a pedestal end calms this elevation down, and I think that's important. What's interesting about this, and I know this sounds crazy, but we're always looking for drink stands. This has been something that we, you know, when you don't have room for another coffee table or just can't talk to the coffee table, somebody's got to be able to put their fantastic martini down. So this is a drink stand that I dubbed a drink stand, but it's actually a lunchbox from Japan. It's really, see, so when they sent, there goes the glass. Anyway, when they sent this, I don't know, from A to B, they put all the lunch inside. And then to me, this worked so well. It's the perfect size for a drink stand, but I love that it has this wonderful metalwork, the caning, and then I had to add the glass, of course, because if not, it would have gone right through the caning. So that's a drink stand. I think it's so important to give back to the community, and we've basically been doing this for the last 20 years. Among the things that we've done was a women's shelter for Safe Horizon. We did one of the vest pocket parks for Bette Midler in her, what's it called, One Million Trees in New York. That was very exciting. We did it in Brooklyn and had the input of the people who live in the neighborhood, and they've been really very supportive, and I've gone back to visit it, and they've kept it up beautifully. We also have done two big projects at Kips Bay, where I'm on, Kips Bay Boys and Girls Club, where I'm on the board. Kips Bay takes care of 11,000 kids, after-school kids, and gives them a very safe environment in which to grow. I started there with a kitchen, a learning kitchen, because I've been so obsessed and worried about childhood obesity and the fact that kids don't understand that fast food is bad food, and we have some teachers coming there, and the kids have really enjoyed getting to know, we call them culinary skills, so hopefully maybe some of them will even have careers in restaurants and stuff. Recently, we just finished the redesign of one of another Kips Bay project. They have 11 facilities in the Bronx, and this one was a big facility with game rooms and teenage centers. In addition, we're now working on phase two of that project. We're transforming the gym into a theater, so that should be also interesting. We do have some famous theater alums, like Kerry Washington and Jennifer Lopez, so again, hopefully this will have an effect on their lives, but that's only we did something at Mount Sinai. I mean, we try to do a project, if not every year, then every other year, and it's very gratifying. Okay, so going up the stairs, what was really interesting about adding this chair rail is it allowed me to hang the art in what's called salon style, which means that there's no, it's not symmetrical, it's just kind of free form, which of course it isn't, but it's supposed to look like it's free form, and so it has, it really adds a lot of depth to the apartment, because the lower floor is 10 feet, the upper floor is 9 feet, so you get to experience the whole height of the residence. I also love what this chandelier did. In the old days, I had a very classical English lantern here, and to be honest, to me, it seemed like a big bore. I guess maybe the lesson of this is correctness is boring right now, and it's important to break the envelope a little bit, so adding this 20th century Murano light really changed my whole feeling about the space. So now we're on the second floor landing. There are several rooms that go off of this, and what was important to me was, number one, to make it as light as possible, because there's no natural light here, but also to make it fairly neutral, so that you'd go into other rooms from it. This is bark paper, which is a natural paper that's cut into squares, and of course I couldn't resist just a little hit, so we added this cobalt blue leather binding on the carpet, because it would have been a little boring without anything happening, and again there's more art here, and it's American and Asian. This is really interesting. This is from China from around 1820, and it's the story of the Chinese trade and very important views that everybody who's been to Asia will recognize, so that was important for me, but then I have it next to a 20th century dancer, so I love all this. So now we've gone into the entry of the guest bedroom. I'm not going to show you that because it's got my husband's peloton on the inside, but here's a picture made off of our Japanese wedding picture by an artist that one of my kids knew, and so I love that I have it memorialized in more than one way. Okay, so now welcome to my Imelda closet. This was a dream of that was finally consummated when all three children left the nest, so this was my daughter's room, and I ripped everything out, and I decided to put a room just surrounded by closets. Very important in a dressing room, in my opinion, to have doors. This is a big conversation I have with all of our clients. If you really want anybody comes to visit to know how many pairs of shoes you are, do not forget to put it all behind doors. Very important, but anyway, this was exciting because I got to use her room for my personal needs, and it's all done in a kind of celadon green color scheme, which is very much what's called Swedish Gustavian design, and I had a decorative painter come in and paint every single molding here, which took about a month, because not only did we have to paint all the moldings, we had to decide which motif from the zillion motifs to use, but I think the most exciting part of this room are these iglomizé panels. Iglomizé is the art of painting glass from the back, so there are only very few people who can do this, but so it took, again, it took forever to decide on the motifs and to figure it out and then use it, but I think that adds so much glamour to my dressing room, and I've cleaned it up for all of you today, but it's very helpful to have this. We travel a lot, I can lay everything out and figure out what I'm doing, so it's really good. My daughter still, who is now quite old, laments that her room is gone, but you know what? It's too bad, because I love it. It's been great to redesign the space. Basically, that's the most precious commodity in all of design. If you have the space, and you have some talented people that you're working with, you can do anything. You just have to figure out what your goal is, and also understand that the goals, the ideal of the home does not stay static forever, because you start as young marrieds, and then hopefully you have children, and then the children get older, and then the children potentially go away to school, then they come home with their girlfriends and boyfriends, and then they could not be more happy to stay in the ancestral home, where mom and dad are going to take care of them, so there isn't one moment where you can say this is the ideal home, but for me now, this works perfectly. I know that many people move a lot, but I find it more nourishing to me emotionally to redesign the home for my changing needs. It gives me such comfort to be in a home that has all my memories, all my books, all my art, all my photos. I have oodles of family photos, and I didn't need to go any other place, because I think we were lucky enough to find such a great space day one. So when designing a dressing room, there are a few little practical things you should always be cognizant of. One is include an ottoman. It's so great not only to use it to sit down and put on your shoes, but this is where I pack, and I lay out things for all my upcoming travels, and here we were very lucky to work with this wonderful artisan who hand-painted this ultra suede in a very modern kind of iconography, and I just love it, and this is where I live. So I never show anybody the insides of my closet, but that's how warm I feel about homeworking. But I have some really important takeaways here, which honestly most of the architects don't understand. Women have shoes and boots in different heights, and it's so important. See this? You have to have adjustable shelves, because one year I may have 10 pairs of ballet slippers and 20 boots, or the reverse. You have to be flexible. It's so important, and the other thing is, and this is something I always disagree with the architects about, glass shelves. Two reasons. Number one, you can windex the shelves. You can clean them. Shoes come in off the street. They need to be put in a clean place. Also, if you put wooden shelves here, it'll take you three times as long for your installation, because you have to paint the shelves like you paint the shelves in a bookcase. This is much quicker. Just zip in. Also, if they do not give me grommets, I kill them, because I have had so many installs with my women in my office were like trying to get those pegs in, killing us. This is another little tidbit for dressing rooms. These are what's called adjustable ballet bars, so you put them in and out, so I have a whole system, what needs to be cleaned, what needs to be pressed, what needs to go to the trip next week. You can lay everything out and really see everything. It's a beautiful thing. This is one of my favorite pieces of antiques. This is a Dutch neoclassical commode. The Dutch were great furniture makers at the end of the 18th century, but really, this period did not last very long, because styles, amazingly enough, became more modern. Regency, not so modern, but anyway, it has all these motifs, these wonderful original pulls that are like urns. Look at all the detailing here, like little tooth things, the beautiful marble top, the canted corners, this sheaf of wheat motif, which I've never really understood why, something for the city, but whatever. It's a very wonderful, warm, like maple wood. You may have noticed that in every room in the apartment, I have Venetian blinds. Venetian blinds are a gift for all of us, especially people who live on a lower floor like I do, because I can adjust this so people can either look into the room or not look into the room. And it also gives you an opportunity to embellish them with custom cords that match, just happen to match, the tassel fringe on the curtains. Finding the perfect day in New York is like going to a smorgasbord where you can't decide what you want to eat. New York is perfect. There's so much to do. The museums, the theater, the restaurants, the places like Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, which I went to recently, they're so inspiring. I mean, it's just, you know, I love opening the Friday paper and trying to decide what my route's going to be, but having these endless possibilities is wonderful, very exciting. I have a 93-year-old friend who's very, very sharp, and he said to me, what keeps me young is New York City. It's an aphrodisiac. Okay, so now we're in the entry to my master bedroom suite. There are a few takeaways here. Number one, this is at the end of a long bedroom hall. Very important to have a mirror at the end of a hall. It augments light. And this one is very special because it has the craziest characteristic. It makes everybody look 10 to 15 pounds thinner. I actually had one of the mirror people come up here to see if we could replicate it and make a fortune, but we couldn't do it. But this is interesting too, because we just looked at the Eglo Musee reverse painted glass in my dressing room, and here it is done in the Regency period, back in 1820. So this is a technique that was available forever. So one other thing to point out, I have an aversion to having wall-to-wall carpets meet each other. There's nothing worse. By the way, we put saddles in under every door, so at least they won't be abutting each other. So this is what we call a transitional stencil right here. So this is so that I have the two different carpets, three actually, if you think about the bedroom, the study, and the hallway. It would be horrible if we had them all meeting each other. So this is a stencil that we designed actually off an Italian church to give you some air, some breathing space between the spaces. Let me show you my bedroom. Here we are. The bedroom has my favorite color combination, red, as I've said many times, and also kind of a golden yellow. So this yellow is what I call Siena yellow. It's a yellow that comes from all the buildings in Siena, Italy, and I'm on the board of Friends of Florence, so I'm going to give it a little plug here. But other than that, what's wonderful about this is it's done with Venetian stucco, and if you touch it, it's like a baby's bottom. It's like so lovely. So that's the kind of, that was the concept behind the room. Again, we're also always into detail, so every room that we do, we do custom linens to augment the color scheme. And here I have my surprise, red with a little bit of gold. These curtains I actually stole from a show house that we did for Kipp's Bay. I couldn't stand that they were just going to go in a box for the rest of eternity. Luckily, it only had two windows, so I was able to cut it down because the ceiling height was much larger, and use the curtain panels, which we actually had done in New York, which is a beautiful thing. And so, and then I added, this is, we call this a backdrop. This whole story about curtains, I could go on for hours about them, and whether you want to see the top of the window or not. And in the old days, we did a but now we're using a lot of this, what we call the backdrop. But of course, we have to really deal with the details. So we have the custom curtain hardware with the beautiful gold finials at the end. This is a really beautiful Baroque Italian commode. And I love this Rosetta marble on the top. That's by Edmond Tarbell, and it's called something like Late Afternoon. And I love the feeling behind this. He did this around 1900. What's so interesting is that this woman is maybe a singer, nobody knows for sure, but she's dressed in an evening dress, and she looks like she's studying her music about to go on, go on in a concert performance. And it has Venetian lines, my signature. So I kind of love this. It's one of the big issues in design is what to hang above the bed. And I can only say that this is lucky, this is a queen size bed, because we're not, my husband and I are not that very big. So but over a king size bed, oh my god, I could write a book about it. Please, all young artists, just produce art for above a king size bed. Because it's a big failure in the market. I mean, you barely find a horizontal long skinny picture. So anyway, so the way to deal with that is to do a series of small pictures. And this really doesn't belong, I need to replace that, because it's people in the subway. I'm not sure what that means in terms of like your bedroom. But these kind of, this is George Luke's, and this is Nadelman, you saw his sculpture downstairs in the library. And I love the fact that they're dancing. I mean, that's that all seemed very like appropriate for bedroom. I think the, I think the subway has to go. Classically, people always put a mirror on top of a chest because you were taking out your tie or your piece of jewelry or whatever. And you wanted to see what looked in the mirror. Here, I did it very purposefully because it's reflecting the west facing window on the other side of the room. This is not a particularly bright apartment. So getting an extra window in the room was very important to me. And this was actually done, this is interesting too, this was actually done, maybe I would say like 1980. And it's Silas Sindel. And it's also a Glomisé work, reverse painted on glass. And it has my beloved gold in it. So that was like a no brainer. And then this is fun. This was a picture that was taken of me by Harry Benson, who's famous. I'm not sure if he's still alive. But he was, he was famous for having photographs of the Beatles when they first came to America. And he was hired by Architectural Digest to do a lot of personality photos. And this is in my office. And that's where he placed me. And I love it because it was memory of a really fun afternoon with him. And also of his great talent. And it's got a red glass frame from Murano. Okay, a lot of our clients, especially men, I don't know why they don't like overhead lights at all, especially in a bedroom. But let me just show you what happens when I turn it off as I did in the living room. Look at that. The room becomes somber. So I think you're lying in bed, it's nice to look at something pretty. And this is a very unusual Austrian chandelier because typically they were 90% of the time, or more 95%. But I found this one downtown and the dealer is no longer with us. And I just walked in. I said, Okay, I have to have it. Of course, I had something there already. But this was an upgrade for me. I would say that most people really put all their emphasis on the living room because that's the company room. But for me, I feel like we have to put importance and gravitas in every room. I don't want to prioritize because it would be like saying you're sending one kid to a great school and the other kid to a bad school. So we have to do the best we can within the budgets, of course. And of course, when the budgets are higher, you can do more. But we know how to scale down. So I try to make at least the broad strokes really good in every room. And then later you can come back and augment it. But I wouldn't prioritize one thing after another because it depends on your personality and every design should be based on the personality and interests of the client, right? That's the most important. But anyway, this is fun. And this goes back really to actually like my mother-in-law. I love having a skirted dressing table in a bedroom because I can sit here at night when we're getting ready to go out and I'll be able to talk to my husband. If I went to my own dressing room, I'd never see him. And these are skirted tables that we do very, very often. I'm not sure I can open this because I didn't clean it up at all. But you can see there's seven drawers. There are wings that have places for cosmetics or whatever else you need, old glasses, and great mirror, great light. This is kind of like designing closets. You know, you have to know your client and how much stuff they have. And this is, to me, very synonymous with what we do in dressing rooms. First of all, it has to be functional. Second, beautiful, of course. But you need to assess what you or your clients need in terms of storage. I have so much storage in here, mostly because I really can't throw out a lipstick. You know, I never know when that particular shade is going to be great. But what's great about this, too, I have my phone here. I have my pad. I have my pencils. I have my glasses. I have photographs of my children, my husband when he was younger, my children when they were younger. And I can definitely, like, this really goes back in a way before the iPhone, when in the morning, when I'd be getting dressed to go out, everything was on the phone. Are you coming to there? Are you going there? You know, so, but it still works. And I'm delighted to have, you know, good light. And then we augmented it. We designed this because I didn't want to put just a regular old makeup mirror here. It wouldn't be pretty. So we designed this a hundred years ago, a limited edition, which nobody seems to want again now. But anyway, the carpet I'm very proud of. This is one of the Coleman and Kravitz designs. It was based, I know this sounds crazy. We did it with Crosby Street Studios. It was based on a photograph that I took of the waterfall at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris, where the water is rippling down in different shades. And we did it in beige. We did it in green. I've just loved this. So now I'm in the chair, which I never sit in because I always have something to do. But anyway, it's supposed to be welcoming. What's interesting about this is here's another signature drinks table because you never want to be in a chair where you can't put your drink down and also to have good lighting. And this is fun. We did this as a sample for curtains that I was about to do. So it has every different color of metallic thread from India and it just became too big a project. So I said, let's call it, you know, it reminds me of Julia Child. If your souffle doesn't work, call it a mousse. So this is like, if your sample doesn't work, call it, it's not a curtain. Now it's a throw pillow. So here we have a throw pillow with wonderful metallic threads, which I'm sure I'll use sometime someday. But it was, can you imagine, I wanted to do a whole wall of this. I can't imagine what it would be in today's world. But anyway, but everything here is about detailing the cord on the chair. This was a wonderful vendor we had who could do throws that had two shades of color. I mean, it's like, it's amazing what people out there can do. This is very good too. We use this also, we hate old fashioned bedspreads because they just feel like dust collectors. So we had, this is a wonderful weaver from upstate New York, who you give them the fabric colors and then he does samples of what he could do. And this is cashmere and silk. So it's light. The old bedspreads were so heavy and they give you a real lumpy look, which is not a good look. I'd say here's our master bathroom, which was really inspired by all the wonderful bathrooms I stayed in, in my many trips to Italy. Number one, I fell in love with marble. I can't even explain how much I love marble, but what I need to tell all your viewers is that you must go to the marble yard. You must also template your marble because if not, for example, I was asleep when the day they put this in the big large circle, it really was supposed to go in the other direction. When I came here, I cried, but luckily I got used to it. It's fine. It's going out the window. That's the hamper. A few choice photographs. And then this, which I'm obsessed with, this incredible sculpture of pills suspended in like a resin. I love that. I had been going to renewal galleries to buy things for clients, always admiring these. And one year we had a very good year with them and they actually gave it to me as a present. So that was lovely. So this leads into my study, which was actually a shared study before the kids moved out. But now I get to populate it with all my stuff, which is really good. And I didn't clean up too much because I was told not to clean up too much. This room really expresses my love of orange in addition to red. So take a look at the walls. We now have a new vendor from Italy who does couture, who weaves these fabrics for us. And what's interesting about this, which you can't tell from the photograph, it's so iridescent. There are all these threads put in the fabric. It's so iridescent. And then because I had two walls of books, it was important to have the curtains repeat the fabric that's on the other two walls to kind of unify the room. And here again, we have another one of our exciting embroideries on the curtain. We have something that was new to us. This is one of our vendors, actually from Brooklyn, who embellishes leather with hand embroidered stuff. Couldn't say no to that. So we don't typically buy upholstery from a showroom, you know, that's open to the public. We only buy for the ones that cater to the trade. And we have two or three that we work with all the time. And this is one of our special, special people that we love. So I love these. This is also interesting too. This throw pillow is done by a Japanese artist who lives in America who kind of does these, I don't know what to call them, but like abstract landscapes. The window seat was so great. I lived there during COVID. The window seat is such a great thing to have in a room. I can lie down and sit up because I fit, because I'm short. And I lived there during COVID and read all my books and did my computer in the window. It was a wonderful thing. Okay, so it's the same philosophy behind all of our bookcases, which is the mix between flat things, in this case photographs of the family, and then these orange Chinese pottery that I found in London. And it kind of completes the orange color scheme of the room. This desk I love. And I bought it from John Roselli when he had, you know, several stores. And I was told that it was Bunny Williams' old desk. And I hope it is, because I love Bunny, and I love that she's channeling me when I'm sitting there. So we've talked about my obsession with bookcases. And along with John Murray, the architect who worked on this, we came up with this detail, which is called a ratcheted bookshelf. Because as opposed to, I showed you my shoe cabinet, that has the grommeted pins, which are not half as attractive as these. Look at how beautiful these are. So we use this for adjustable shelves, which is really good. And the other thing that John did that was so clever is, you see this space here? That's a corner column in the building. It's holding the building up. So he figured out that we could mask it with a little self-promotion, the five books that I've written. And that's what I've done here. Okay, like in every room, the chandelier is a must. A must, a must. And this one is also Austrian and early 19th century. And I love it with the modern art. This was made like five years ago. I bought that from a downtown dealer. I was so impressed with all the orange. I had to put it in the room. People are born with their color palettes. I'll give you an example. Recently, we finished three homes for a woman who lives primarily now in Miami Beach. So New York, Miami Beach, and the Hamptons. And she only likes the color blue. And there are only very specific shades of blue that she likes. And it was a challenge to make each residence look different and exciting. But I think we came off okay. This is a very personal space for me, because I have pictures of the whole family at various moments. Here I have some of my favorite books that I mean, I do work in this room all the time. So I'm also always opening these books for inspiration. And again, another mirror. Gotta have a mirror, right? And again, it takes that window on Park Avenue and augments it. As you see, I have a lot of books on the floor, which when I was younger, was considered a no-no. But I love the books that are like, I always try to make them not much taller than the table that they're next to. I used to have them in two stacks, so they were shorter, but then I didn't know it was behind. So now I go just as high or a little bit higher than whatever wood piece it's next to. And it just gives me a lot of pleasure to know that I have all these books here. Even if I haven't read a whole bunch of them, I mean, I've read most of them, but that's the story. Home is a refuge. It's so wonderful and so special to have a place that you can go to, which not only is a repository for all your memories, but gives you great solace in this crazy world, especially now that we're living in. Home is so important. So I feel very lucky to be in a profession that gives such joy and comfort to so many people. Thanks for watching. Be sure to go to homeworthy.com for exclusive content, shopping guides, and so much more.