Spring is here, sigh, a leaf trembles. If you’re going to throw everything out the window and repaint top to bottom—which New Yorkers often do because they have so much time on their hands—what color is the color of the moment? All the experts say the subject is too personal: pink for Heather, umber for Read More
Ecological consciousness has become so big, so fast in the past two years. We got a little sleepy after the 1960’s, 1970’s, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and the crying Indian and those “Give a Hoot, Don’t Pollute” Keep America Beautiful public-service announcements. There were years of worrying about other matters. But then came scientific reports, Read More
The other night, Tony Curtis was in a mid-century movie with some pole lamp behind his head. Then what? It became obvious that the mid-century—and the Bauhaus before that—has brought us to a blank and minimalist standstill. In the dull, flat, glassy and Corian world of today, there are no recesses, no secrets, no shadows, Read More
Look, you can see Britney Spears’ former penthouse,” said real-estate agent Adam Modlin, pointing out one of 50 windows at the triplex penthouse at 704 Broadway. That long greenhouse? “No, no, look—five windows in. It’s the top three floors under the roof and the glass on top …. I sold it last year for $4 Read More
At least a hundred brooms and mops hang from the ceiling of what would, under other circumstances, be the living room of Byron and Susan Bell’s 1,500-square-foot 1876 Chelsea townhouse. That room isn’t far from five others full of thousands of baskets, pots, mousetraps, locks, toys, tools and hats—all, by the way, very tidy and Read More
Are private libraries still part of the property dream? With everyone blathering at dinner parties about digitization and books becoming dots—the way they did in the 1800’s about the cotton reaper—and book-scanning stations in India and China transforming 100,000 pages a day, and then some robot in Silicon Valley laughing to itself as it scans Read More
The private-equity trader had to have the pumpkin-shaped doorknob in every room. He’d just bought an 1856 townhouse in the West Village, and he and his architect came upon a distinctive period knob in the apartment of one of the rent-regulated tenants that came with the building. They wanted to replica te it—not just in Read More
Where did all the skinny spiral staircases go? That was a time.
How about the silver one in Sunday in New York in 1963 (sing: “Life’s a ball …. Let it fall right in your lap”) that goes up to a sleeping loft in Jane Fonda’s airplane-pilot brother’s 65th Street apartment, where she and Rod Read More
