Story credit her childhood, helmed by art-obsessed dad and mom, for her wanderlust and accumulating proclivity. Having grown up in Asia after which suburban Houston—her father is within the oil enterprise; her mom was a museum curator—the appreciation for “an eclectic mixture of furnishings and finishes” got here early on, she says, pointing to Laotian lacquered pumpkins on a grasshopper-shaped wicker desk.
Upstairs—with its totally geared up fitness center, infrared sauna, and cold-plunge ice tub—the third ground is now an oasis for the self-proclaimed health obsessive. Its dwelling space, painted in Benjamin Moore’s Pink Innocence, is mirrored in a blown-glass mirror by Jeremy Maxwell Wintrebert over the mantel. The vivid aerie contrasts with the neighboring “working kitchen,” the place the entire household’s meals are ready, a walnut-paneled jewel field with a classic Knoll eating set beneath a George Nelson pendant.
Whereas restricted structural work was completed throughout the acquisition of the assorted flats, the amalgamation of flooring 4 and 5 in 2007 was an exception. Within the household room of that mixed house, a big Daniel Richter portray of the Afghan mountains covers a lot of the bookshelves alongside one wall. Close by, a lineup of carved-wood monks from Thailand retains watch, and nearly each floor in between is dotted with little silver, ceramic, and stone curiosities of disparate origins. The eat-in kitchen, punctuated by Jonas Wooden’s graphic French Open, is the scene of every day meals round a painted elm desk. The couple’s bed room subsequent door is the backdrop for household film nights. There, two work of Story, one by Will Cotton and the opposite by Ragnar Kjartansson, complement works by Yoshitomo Nara, Friedrich Kunath, and Alison Blickle.
Crowning the tackle, the fifth ground is accessed by a sculptural spiral staircase, and it consists of skylights that illuminate this area. Previously comprising three studios, this warren of rooms—together with a crimson Morocco-inspired tub—feels appropriately relaxed however no much less artfully adorned.
In contrast to the designer’s different homes—a pristine compound on a 500-acre unfold in Texas Hill Nation (AD, April 2014), a gut-renovated 1874 Excessive Victorian Gothic property on the Hudson River (AD, November 2016), and a newly acquired pied-à-terre in Paris’s Saint-Germain-des-Prés—the Gramercy Park abode is a mille-feuille of Story’s unrestrained private aesthetic. And that, she insists, comes right down to the abundance of 1 defining function.
“I feel a house feels empty in case you don’t have artwork. And it’s not all costly artwork—it may be work your kids have completed,” muses Story, whose new e-book on the topic, The Artwork of Residence, will likely be printed by Rizzoli this fall. “Typically you go to somebody’s dwelling and so they don’t actually have that, and you’re feeling like one thing’s lacking…. It’s having some whimsy and shade and magic in your partitions. That’s dwelling.”
This story seems in AD’s June 2023 challenge. To see this Gramercy Park dwelling in print, subscribe to AD.
