The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
SECOND TIME AROUND
This Brooklyn apartment is a treasure trove of upcycled, recycled and antique finds. Words and photographs by Mark C O’flaherty
EVEN IF AMERICAN lives don’t, as F Scott Fitzgerald once famously wrote, have a second act, the rooms that house them frequently do. Especially when the owners work in fashion. When Mark Haldeman, the US regional manager of Paul Smith, and James Aguiar, fashion dire ctor of Modern Luxury magazines and former creative director at Nina Ricci, moved back into the Brooklyn apartment they had rented a decade earlier, they knew they didn’t want it to look anything like it had before. ‘ It was our first apartment together, and a huge part of our lives,’ says Aguiar. ‘But it’s fun and challenging to change. When we found out that th e ap a r t ment was av a i l a bl e an d decided to move back in, we knew we wanted a whole new look. It freaks me out when I go into someone’s house and it’s a time capsule of a certain period of their lives.’
Their new library space represents the most dramatic change in the twostorey Brownstone flat. Packed from floor to ceiling with fashion and design monograph b o oks, the ro om has s wit c he d f ro m it s or i g i nal Di a na
The couple aren’t purists. A lot of the furniture is made up of reupholstered thrifty finds
Vreeland ‘garden in hell’ red colour scheme to an emerald green, taking its cue from a Fornasetti Malachite pattern that they love, now a wallpaper covering the ceiling as well as the sides of the room. ‘ This is a space that ’s meant to inspire,’ says Haldeman. ‘The shelves aren’t really organised; it’s nice to grab a book and just sit down with it and discover something. There’s also a TV for the evening – it’s the room we spend the most of our time in.’
There’s plenty of design pedigree in this Brooklyn home. Years before Haldeman was approached by Paul Smith, he worked with the interior designer John Derian, and on the estate of the late artist Tony Duquette. Still one of the most influential names in stage and film design, Duquette was famed for his glamorous, maximalist flourishes. ‘I worked with a variety of manufacturers to get Tony’s designs back into production,’ explains Aguiar. The gold skeleton of a giant toad, sitting on a coffee table in the couple’s lounge, is one of those remade pie ces, while the huge, theatrical painting hanging in their stairwell was originally the backdrop for a window display of Duquette designs at Bergdorf Goodman. ‘The green fabric on the chairs in the library is also something we reissued with Jim Thompson fabrics ,’ he adds .‘ It’ s Duquette’s Royal Ermine design.’
Aguiar and Haldeman might be well-versed in applied art but they aren’t purists. A lot of the furniture in the flat is made up of reupholstered thrifty finds, such as the headboard in the master bedroom, which was originally in a room at the Waldorf Astoria. ‘ We found it in a random loft sale in Williamsburg for a hundred bucks,’ recalls Aguiar. There is a cupboard in the library that has a cross-hatch pattern of brass rods on its doors. It looks like it could be some Gio Ponti midcentury treasure, but actually the pair found it as a wall hanging in the discount department store Target, had it cut up and attached it to the doors.
Their apartment is all fashion and fun. Aguiar describes his favourite colour as ‘Pucci’, and their dressing room consists of Ikea wardrobes, customised to incorporate cork panels, pinned with invitations and inspirational fashion
images. ‘We add to the collage and take away from it all the time,’ says Aguiar of the expanse of ephemera that looks just like a designer’s mood board.
Predictably, Haldeman’s half of their wardrobe is full of Paul Smith. ‘Actually I have much less than half of the space,’ he points out. ‘I live relatively simply because I wear one label, but James has tons and tons.’ Aguiar admits he continually fails at adopting a one-in-one-out policy with his clothes: ‘Some things I might only wear once, and they go into what I call “the archive”.’ One standout piece in that archive is a white suit that he customised himself with thousands of googly eyes. It ’s a lo ok that has appeared in a variety of New York gossip column and party pages.
One of the few things that has gone back on the wall of the Brooklyn apartment after being here before is a piece of vintage signage which us e d to belong to Haldeman’s uncle. ‘He ran an antique store in the West Village,’ he explains, ‘and had it painted for the shop. When he closed the store, he kept