In the hallway of a flat overlooking Central Park, an 18th-century painted-silk wallcovering depicting tea cultivation in East Asia sets the tone for the cornucopia of global glories beyond. Assembled by a discreet member of Manhattan high society, treasures include a Syrian inlaid chest, a Venetian crystal chandelier and an entire five-bay Rajasthani façade. They’re worth the world to her, learns John Heilpern.
Reprinted from World of Interiors August 2017
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We first encountered the beautiful, beguiling lady formerly known to us as the anonymous ‘Ms W’ when she lived in her tiny ‘safe harbour’ up in the eaves of a somewhat spooky building overlooking Central Park in Manhattan (Wol Aug 2002). Though not particularly shy, she’s among a rare breed of admirable women in fashionable New York circles who prefer to hide rather than parade. But we don’t mind! We can still celebrate her achievement now that she’s transformed an impressively bigger, grander space within the same landmark building into one of the loveliest and most enjoyably unconventional apartments in town.

The nine-metre-long hallway is lit by two1930s Italian beaded. Templemotif chandeliers, and the walls are covered in Chinese export wallpaper, c1770, which originally hung in Lady X’s grandparents’ flat but was later spotted by chance in a magazine. It tells the story of tea. An 18th-century Italian Renaissance-style walnut bench sits on a ‘thoroughly impractical’ hand-knotted red silk carpet from Doris Leslie Blau.
We first encountered the beautiful, beguiling lady formerly known to us as the anonymous ‘Ms W’ when she lived in her tiny ‘safe harbour’ up in the eaves of a somewhat spooky building overlooking Central Park in Manhattan (Wol Aug 2002). Though not particularly shy, she’s among a rare breed of admirable women in fashionable New York circles who prefer to hide rather than parade. But we don’t mind! We can still celebrate her achievement now that she’s transformed an impressively bigger, grander space within the same landmark building into one of the loveliest and most enjoyably unconventional apartments in town.
Here are two or three key reasons to help explain the wittily playful, conceivably nuts, design aesthetic of our newly elevated ‘Lady X’. The long corridor that welcomes visitors in a breathtaking blaze of light, for example, is saturated with color and covered entirely with an 18thcentury Chinese export wall painting that tells thestoryof growing tea. How she found it and why it means everything to her is quite a story in itself: ‘Miraculously, it came back to me! I was leafing through a magazine when I came across a photo of a room with a panel of Chinese wallpaper. I recognized it immediately from my grandparents’ Fifth Avenue apartment. Gracie, the antique dealer listed in the magazine, had copies of it for sale, but also all the original wallpaper itself. I was mindblown! Can you blame me? They’d bought it years ago from my grandparents’ estate. I mean I actually grew up looking at that wallpaper.’ And so it returned to her two generations later, ‘preserved and conserved’ – her favourite words – when Gracie most graciously offered to sell her the complete original for a small fortune. It seemed predestined for her long hallway. ‘Because weirder still, it fitted it exactly…’

Concerning the birthright of our mysterioso ‘Lady X’ – not to be confused, of course, with the more notorious ‘Madame X’ portrayed by John Singer Sargent in 1883 – it’s known that she was fortunate enough to be born into a prominent American family who’ve embraced ambassadorships and politics, philanthropy and the clergy, art and rare-book collections, even that riff-raff better known as actors. Lady X more comfortably admits that she’s the rebellious fifth of six siblings she clearly adores. The influence of her revered dad, an unusually self-effacing Wall Street banker of the old school, and her well-liked, stylish, prodigal mum has, we dare imagine, rooted her enigmatic life since college in the apparent contradiction of her innate reticence and brazenly spendthrift ways.
Another startling sample of her risky aesthetic is the day she stunned her customarily unflappable design duo of longtime good friends, decorator Carey Maloney and architect Hermes Mallea, by purchasing in a heartbeat the balconied facade of an 18th-century five-storey house originally from the fortress city of Jodhpur, in India. ‘I thought it might somehow fit in the living room,’ she recalls rather sheepishly. ‘They thought I was nuts at first.

They were right! But then, we’ve always had a lot of fun working together, so I’m happy to say they can be as nuts as me.’ A shop in Hudson, upstate, had had the facade dismantled and each piece numbered, then shipped home on a very slow boat, where a year later it was reassembled. ‘And then I walked in,’ says Lady X, ‘and wanted it taken apart again and trucked to New York City.’
Her unapologetic opposition to the conventional dictates of decoration is further illustrated by the singular sensation of the willfully shocking pink and puce curtains in her study, from Christopher Hyland. ‘I love them because they clash with everything!’ Another surprise can be found at the foot of Lady X’s bed: Cecil B. de Mille’s casting couch, bought at the old Christie’s East when it handled his estate. As the sofa’s original mohair ‘had seen perhaps a bit too much duty’, the new owner, ever the lady, had it re-covered in Fortuny.

Lady X’s apparently carefree approach to the eternally neurotic-making ‘when will it ever be finished’ renovation game is something she holds dear. For her, the creative sparks, the pull and push, of a trusting collaboration with flexible decorators and architects is ‘the great fun of it’. It’s a mash-up of paradoxical pleasure, an almost private enjoyment of joky allusions. That would apply to her tempting secret doors, or the one-of-a-kind early 19th-century English library staircase made of lacy cast iron that also serves as a trellised sculpture and bookshelf, or her daft, whimsical palm trees made of golden tin (lineage: 1950s Palm Beach). Then again, there’s her scarlet estuaries of gloriously impractical silken carpets; just because.

For all her worldliness, Lady X’s evident enthusiasms almost – but not quite – mask an uncommon, touching naivety. Informing us of her gregariousness is her vast variety of friends: her former professors of architecture, film producers and writers, a Nobel laureate in the sciences, a cross-dressing real-estate man of stylish renown, and a maestro of Baroque music. This American democrat with ye olde Britain and Europe proudly in her DNA is among the least snobbish women we know, while remaining an unrepentant snob in matters of artless good taste.

‘No fuss, no muss,’ she adds like a mantra, as her husband drifts amiably into the room, wondering: ‘Has anyone seen my specs?’ She calls him ‘His Nibs’. This is how she is, in unguarded privacy at least. So we asked His Nibs, who appears a comfortable decade or so her senior, if his one and only Lady Xever consulted him during the conception of their brave, new home. ‘You must be joking,’ he replied as they burst with laughter and she pointed with exquisite patience to his lost spectacles sitting absentmindedly on his forehead. They’ve been happily married for just two years, after a somewhat prolonged 24-year courtship. ‘Best to be on the safe side, don’t you think?’ said Lady X, laughing affectionately again.
To contact M(Group), the company of architect Hermes Mallea and interior designer Carey Maloney, visit mgrouponline.com
Photography Simon Upton
Reprinted from World of Interiors August 2017
