The other day I visited a photographer friend named Pieter -who has had much success shooting homes around the world for top shelter magazines- at his own apartment. He lives and works on the penthouse floor of an old building bordering Gramercy Park. As you past the old fashioned elegance of the gated park and are let in to Pieter’s dusty lobby via a fuzzy buzzer, you feel you might run into Edith Wharton as easily as Andy Warhol. After taking the rickety elevator as high as you can go, you walk the final flight of stairs up to the tippety top floor where only he lives- a rare feat in real estate not to mention life. There are no topiaries or grand art to welcome and usher you in. Rather dozens of children’s art decorate the staircase walls- the artist being his young son.
Let’s just say he always has me at hello at this point. For this both grand and homey place is as much a child’s imaginative domain as his father’s. Inside the first thing you see in the loft-like space is a floor to ceiling oil portrait of a man holding his son, held aloft by an enormous wooden easal. The painting is curious in its English manor grandeur and yet distinctly modern in the way its male subjects peer contentedly at the viewer with no mother, sisters or horses in sight. You know this father in this painting is devoted to this child. They need nothing else in the world except each other and yet, they seem receptive to whatever the future holds for them.
A giant table runs along the center of the room like a lifeline- closer inspection reveals it’s actually two identical antique tables pushed together. Pieter was only going to buy one until his father encouraged him to get the pair before he had this apartment. And now here they are in a space that wouldn’t be half as elegant nor as efficient without them. I love stories like that. This is a place where everything you point at has a tale attached to it, whether belonging to parent or child.
One side of the table is Pieter’s enormous computer screen: this area it signals, is about work. The rest of the expansive surface is as ready for dinner parties or play dates. Up here, it feels like any gathering is a celebration for multi generations. From the back wall are floor to ceiling bookshelves, filled with years of Pieter’s pictures of other people’s homes. I think of the thousands of lives captured and shelved here and wonder what has become of them? Children jumping on sofas are now older, posed pets perhaps gone, marriages even dissolved. Many of these places have new occupants now, equally eager to have Pieter shoot their furniture and family placement. It is all a never ending process of creation being captured. A winding staircase brings you down to his son’s room- one featured in my new book “Room for Children”- where Pieter has wallpapered a real-life scaled photograph - taken from his own bedroom when he lived at the Maharani of Deogarh’s palace outside India, around the crib. It’s like a layer from Pieter’s history is cocooning his son’s current life.
Outside on the spectacular terrace, there are so many iconic building tops to gaze at but Pieter immediately points out the nearby turret where the actress Margaret Hamilton used to live. “My son loves to tell people the Wicked Witch from the Wizard of Oz lives there,” he says. I look at the gothic spire and close my eyes for a moment, dazzled by all the possibilities of knowing such a thing as a child. Back inside on the counter I spy a guide to Greece where they’ll be traveling his summer. How can they want to leave this space for one minute, I wonder. On a low slung marble coffee table- in the center sitting area, are careful clusters and contraptions his son has made from Lego. One can see them busily creating- in one medium or the other- the entire afternoon here, as the light pours in through the expansive windows. I eye the grey velvet sofa in front of the coffee table enviously: it has Merchant Ivory feel to it with a dash of Tim Burton. I asked Pieter where he found it, praying it’s from Design Within Reach or from some easily found vendor. “Oh I made it,” he answers humbly. Of course. Child’s play.