Fall Days in New York

A cloudscape on Bowery.

The last two days in New York City have been beautiful, with thin white clouds skittering across a clear blue sky like shallow water lapping at the shore. Fortunately I have some free time to enjoy it!

On Wednesday I went up to midtown to have lunch with my friend Abby and then I attended a reading at the library where my friend author Michael Gross was talking about his new book Rogue's Gallery, about the Metropolitan Museum of Art – more on that in a subsequent post. Later I went to a birthday party for my friend artist Richard Haines in a tiny, rockin' East Village gay bar.

Thursday, I hopped on the blue Schwinn and headed downtown along the Hudson River Park. The river sparkled through the green.


Fall colors are coming to the trees


and the grasses that line the park.


Downtown, I had lunch with my friends from the ad agency. It was great to see them.



Back on the bike, I headed to Soho to check out some stores. Opening Ceremony, on a little street called Howard Street, carries avant garde fashion for men and women. Odin, on Lafayette, has cool clothes for guys. Then I went to one of my favorite stores in New York, John Derian, on East 2nd Street.


I've been writing here about Rough Luxe, and John Derian is a master. The store has a country vintage feel, and he offers iron tables with wood tops, lamps made out of industrial parts, and tee shirts printed with nineteenth century images.


The front of the store features tableware and handmade decoupage objects.


There is peeling paint and a weathered edge but still everything is very refined.

Next door he has another store which sells textiles and is a little softer. It's always fun to visit John Derian. And it was a pleasure to be outside enjoying the city on these afternoons. I still get amazed by the sheer power and population of New York. Uptown, downtown, east side, west side, day or night, the city's energy and its people go on in every direction. I've lived in New York for twenty-six years but sometimes on the street I still look around and think to myself, "I love New York so much."

Style on the Shelf

The post that I wrote below about Suzanne Tucker's book got me going to my library shelves of books and magazines to look at pictures of my favorite rooms and schemes. Let's fire up the scanner, shall we?

The picture above is from the World of Interiors, March 2004 (photographer Francois Jussaud), and shows a home in an industrial warehouse in Antwerp. This room is an orangerie – I think everybody should have an orangerie – and features a collection of old canary bird cages and garden chairs.

The photo below is an apartment in Paris (World of Interiors, January 2003, photographer Guillaume de Laubier). The cover line says, "Chateau on a Shoestring: the flat that thinks it's a manor." Eighteenth century furniture and colorful textiles are jumbled together on bare wood floors.


This is the Tribeca loft of designer Liz Dougherty Pierce (Country Home, September 2000, photographer Reed Davis). The industrial space is filled with a seven-foot table found in Vermont.


The Paris apartment of French actress Isabelle Adjani decorated by Jacques Grange is pictured in the Tashen book Paris Interiors. Pale blue walls, mismatched chairs, a tapestry over the table, and the requisite bare floors create a room which is beautiful and elegant but also comfortable and natural.


I also came across this painting, An Interior in Venice, by John Singer Sargent, which is one of my favorites. I love the mystery of the room as it recedes into darkness.


No matter what the size of the space, candlelight always creates an old-fashioned, romantic aura.

Antiques, plants, flea-market finds, "furniture with legs" (nothing overstuffed), bare floors and mix of wood and iron are all things we like to live with in the apartment.
I wrote about Rough Luxe below, and I would like to find more industrial antique pieces which lend a hard edge but are clean-lined and airy at the same time. I'd like to live like a nineteenth century botanist in a loft by the river. I'm trying to get to something I picture in my mind.

Anthropologie, or Rough Luxe

A rusty bicycle piled high with old leather suitcases in the window of the Fifth Avenue store.

I was invited this week to preview a new television series which will follow Keith Johnson, Anthropologie's world-wide shopper. The series will be on the Sundance Channel starting October 7th, and in each episode, Keith will travel to a new country in search of unusual decorative objects, furniture and textiles for all the Anthropologie stores, as well as artists and crafts people to hire. That sounds like a great job! I'm looking forward to this show.

Keith Johnson is the partner of Glen Senk who is the CEO of Urban Outfitters, which is the parent company of Anthropologie. Their apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan is featured in the current issue of Elle Decor magazine. This couple met when they were nine years old. Ok, that must be a record! The end of the article gave me goose bumps.

I'm a big fan of Anthropologie. Although it's a women's clothing store, I love their items for the home and their store displays. They also have a great selection of style and travel books. Their windows and in-store designs often feature a clever use of paper which I think is charming. I guess other shoppers like Anthropologie too: even during the economic downturn Anthropologie is enjoying healthy growth both in terms of retails sales and stores opening across the country. Whenever I'm in the store on Fifth Avenue there is a line at the cash register.

The home merchandise is like a trip to a Paris flea market. Glasses and dishes are piled on wood and iron displays which are also for sale. I love the antique industrial combination of wood and iron.


I recently came across this article on The Wall Street Journal.com about "Rough Luxe" which celebrates this style. Peeling paint, rusting metal and hewn wood can be romantic when treated luxuriously. The style evokes the past, but in a clean, airy way which is not musty or overstuffed. It's what they do so well at Anthropologie, and it's an inspiration.

This metal painted table in Anthropologie looks like our coffee table which I found at the flea market for $25.


One year at the Jane Street Sale, I spotted this metal lamp shaped like a flower, below. Our next-door neighbor fashion designer Zac Posen asked the seller if he would come down from the $65 price, but it was non-negotiable. I came back later and got it for $40 – sorry Zac! My sister-in-law Tracy who works in retail and knows about these things said I should re-sell it to Anthropologie and they could reproduce it.


But I like it too much.