You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘INTERIOR DESIGN’ category.
SURELY I’M ONE OF THE LAST DESIGN BLOGGERS to catch on to the work of this husband-and-wife team, a pair of former Hollywood set designers, below, who call themselves Roman and Williams even though their names are Robin Standefer and Stephen Alesch (the firm is named after their grandfathers). They’ve designed public spaces and guest rooms for some of New York’s most aggressively trendy hotels — the Ace, the Standard, the Royalton — and their work has been published and re-published in World of Interiors, The New York Times, Metropolis, Remodelista, and scores of other publications, online and off. But it was only when I realized they have a house in Montauk, L.I., that I really took notice.
Their 2,000-square-foot pad on 3/4 acre has that raw, unheated look shared by my own beach house-to-be, so I lit upon all the photos of it I could find. Into the inspiration file — the one in my brain — they go. I like Roman and Williams’ vintage industrial sensibility, classic modern furniture, and ethnic touches, and the way it all seems put together with whatever flea market finds came to hand. I love that some of the interior is whitewashed, some is not, and the ceiling is largely unfinished. It’s a house that makes your typical decorating-magazine fodder look pretty soulless. I could do without the taxidermy, though.
For a slideshow of the house from the Roman and Williams website, go here. “Things We Made,” a book documenting the work of the duo’s first decade, was published last fall by Rizzoli.
HIGH ON MY LIST of things to accomplish this winter, somewhere between “Buy house” and “Update password list” (now 8 typewritten pages long), was “New clothing storage for bedroom.” I had already winnowed as much as I dared, but my four-drawer dresser and single not-so-big closet were not cutting it. If I bought so much as one new sweater, I’d be in wardrobe overflow.
The bedroom in my ground-floor brownstone apartment has a big ol’ hunk of orange wall 75″ across, where once a fireplace stood. Quite a few inches on either side of my midsize dresser were going to waste. There was also the possibility of going up the wall, with some kind of highboy or armoire.
I began my shopping online, considering mid-century ‘bachelor’s chests’ of the type included in bedroom suites of the 1950s and ’60s. They run $600-800, which is about what I planned to spend, but they were dark, stolid, and masculine-looking. I wanted something lighter. With my limited budget, I was looking for a piece of secondhand furniture, so I had no idea what, exactly, I was going to find (that’s the whole fun of it, actually).
My Internet explorations led me to a company I hadn’t heard of, Furnish Green, whose website shows a wide-ranging mix of styles from rustic and cottage-y to industrial and Danish modern. Its site is well-organized and easy to search, but even better was visiting their midtown Manhattan showroom to view their offerings in three dimensions, which I did today. Furnish Green is a find, yet another of those hidden treasures New York offers up when you least expect it.
And where you least expect it. Its showrooms are a few unconnected office spaces on the fifth floor of a garment-center building near Herald Square. One is shared with a ballroom dance studio; another is used for furniture refinishing and for the photography crucial to their online sales (Furnish Green has a big Craigslist presence). That’s Jeffrey, below, one of three employees, in the workroom. The owner, Nathan, is also the owner of the ballroom dance studio.
The main showroom is a bright corner space tightly packed with moderately-priced pieces that are neither precious nor pedigreed, yet most have something quirky or interesting about them.
Furnish Green gets 10-12 new pieces every day. “We do something to almost every one of them,” I was told — not necessarily full-on refinishing or re-upholstering, but steam-cleaning, oiling and polishing, and often, painting, to turn a dull brown piece of American borax (an old term for furnishings mass-manufactured in Grand Rapids, Mich.) into something more closely resembling Shabby Chic.
I came, I saw, I bought (see below). And yes, they deliver.
AS THE OLD YEAR CAME TO A CLOSE, I said goodbye to my beloved East Hampton cottage — at least for a year, perhaps forever. Yet as I drove away on December 15, leaving it to my new renters — a sweet young couple who are over the moon about the place — it was with only a smidgen of regret. My grand plan is unfolding; I’m inching toward closing on another house in the same area. Meanwhile, it’s back to my Brooklyn apartment for the duration (when you have only one residence, I’m afraid it can no longer be called a pied-a-terre).
My East Hampton tenants kept some of my furniture — the sofa, the bed, and a few other major pieces. All my rugs, books, dishes, artwork, etc. had to be packed up and stored in the basement, above, in the space of about five days. My houseplant collection, below, came with me back to Brooklyn, and miraculously I’ve managed to place them all in front of my two windows.
I chafed at the confinement of urban living at first, but I’ve adjusted. There are trade-offs. What you give up in fresh air and bay views and the silence of the woods, you gain in quirky discoveries that can only happen in a great city…like the row of Victorian carriage houses in Prospect Park, below, that I had somehow never noticed before. They’re now used as garages by park maintenance, but wouldn’t they make a charming residential mews?
Or the sight of a vintage subway train pulling into West Fourth Street, bedecked with Christmas ribbons and wreaths…
….a fire escape festooned with lights in Williamsburg…
….or a gingerbread rendering of the new Barclay’s arena, seen at the Joyce Bakeshop in Prospect Heights: all things you wouldn’t see in East Hampton.
Christmas week was a little quiet because, well, I don’t celebrate Christmas. I did some cat-sitting and a whole lot of writing, including an article about Palm Springs’ mid-century architecture for a travel magazine, and two time-consuming pieces for HouseLogic, a website owned by the National Association of Realtors, which led to my one New Year’s resolution for 2013: don’t say yes to any writing assignment that comes down the pike. Life’s too short for hackery.
My sister and I indulged in some year-end furniture and rug shopping, though in my case it was merely speculative. We went to FIND in Gowanus, where I was moved to take a picture of the chairs above. They are crafted out of rubber tires and they are unbelievably comfortable. I’ve never seen anything like them. They were asking $100 for the pair of these oddities. I can’t decide whether I like the look of them or not. Do you?
I am mulling the purchase of a high storage chest like the one above, seen at Re-Pop in Williamsburg, since I’m desperate for additional clothing storage in my bedroom. It’s $850, so I postponed the decision. Whereupon we went next door to the Roebling Tea Room and had cocktails at the bar in an old, high-ceilinged industrial space (I suppose they have tea, too).
Another day, we checked out the kilims at Jacques Carcanagues in SoHo. I can’t get the one above out of my mind. It is 13′ long, 6’6″ wide, and was bought in Afghanistan before the Soviet invasion, we were told. The colors are only four — purple, navy, cream, and white — and so unusual. For $900, it seems a great deal. But without a house, I don’t need a rug.
New York being New York, every time I venture out, there’s a new bar, restaurant or bakery. Above, the new Grandaisy Bakery on the corner of West Broadway and Beach Street. It definitely wasn’t there the last time I looked.
So onward to 2013 with fresh eyes, ears, mind. It’s a new year, so let’s make it new: new adventures, new activities, new people, new prospects, new music, new ideas, new knowledge, new dreams.
WELCOME BACK TO BROWNSTONE VOYEUR, the resumption of a popular casaCARA series in which we go behind the facades of brownstones and other historic Brooklyn housing types to see how folks of today live in the sumptuous spaces of long ago.
“EDITH WHARTON MEETS THIEF OF BAGHDAD”…that’s how Reid Burgess describes the decor of the parlor/garden duplex he and his girlfriend have been working on for almost three years in a classic, detail-laden 1870s Brooklyn brownstone. “People think it’s kind of crazy when we tell them we’re renting,” said Reid, until recently a professional musician who now considers himself a designer/developer. (You can get a look at his first project, a from-the-ground-up ‘little Palladian villa’ in Charleston, S.C., on Reid’s blog.)
Back in Brooklyn, the couple have been busy stripping paint off doors and woodwork, re-painting the place in colors more to their liking, and furnishing with pieces collected from various sources, including eBay, Chinatown, and an auction house in Richmond, Va.
All changes are with permission of the landlord, but still, the couple “had to make virtues out of imperfections,” says Reid. “It’s not a reno where you have complete control of everything. Things I never would have done I’ve learned to think of as interesting.”
For example, they would not have painted the parlor, dining room, and woodwork orange. Some of that they’ve changed, including stripping and staining an arched mahogany door, painting picture rail a dark bronze (it too was orange), and painting other woodwork in Benjamin Moore’s satin-finish Wenge. They also re-painted the back parlor, which they use as a dining room, dark green. But the front parlor remains orange. “We kind of grew to like it,” Reid says.
The front parlor, with its 13′ ceilings, elaborate plasterwork, and over-the-top marble mantelpiece and mirror in High Victorian style, was in very decent shape when Reid and his girlfriend found the place through Craigslist. When they moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn three years ago, Reid says, “It had to be a quintessential parlor. That was the attraction.” The parquet floors, too, with Greek key pattern, were intact and polished.
The white Empire sofa, which Reid says is surprisingly comfortable, was a Craiglist find. Reid paid just a few hundred dollars for it, but he had to drive 17 hours to Pittsburgh and back to pick it up. “That was extreme,” he admits.
The kitchen is in the original hall of the building, off the rear parlor.
Downstairs, the front room is used as a library/guest room, and the back as a bedroom.
The lattice was falling down on the deck off the parlor floor and needed repair.
To dig back into the archives of previous ‘Brownstone Voyeurs,’ click here.
IT’S THE END OF AN ERA: my last Thursday design column for the Brooklyn real-estate website Brownstoner,The Insider, went up this morning.
I saved one of my favorites for last: the 600-square-foot apartment of my friend Robert Farrell, an interior designer, whose careful choices and knowing mix of the modern and the antique have served him well in this very space for a decade-and-a-half. You can read all about it here.
Recent Comments