Looking for the perfect Manhattan home
So – where to live? The moment we decided to go, I knew the answer. We were going to rent a loft. I’ve spent the last 20 years in a family house with a kitchen, separate bedrooms, walls etc – and now is the time to turn into someone from an American movie living in a huge converted warehouse with high rafters, floor-toceiling windows, raw exposed beams and woodburning stoves. The exposed brick walls will have no art by my children but just one huge neon sign saying something like ‘‘Yeah, That, So What’’ in Tracey Emin’s handwriting. The children’s bedrooms will be high sleeping platforms only accessible via a firemen’s pole and there will be a large tree growing out of the middle of the room dividing The Sitting Area from The Chilling Area. The comedian Tina Fey will be lying on a distressed leather chesterfield in The Distressed Leather Chesterfield Area chatting about the American comedy industry while I knock up some steamed quinoa and kale for lunch.
So off I went to Manhattan for three days to scout a school for my sons that was prepared to overlook my 13-year-old’s proclivity for early Slipknot albums, and to hunt for the
loft. Astonishingly, I actually found it. It was owned by a massive Hollywood movie star who was away making massive Hollywood movies and it was available to rent. I quickly pencilled it over the phone and asked for a viewing to check it was as fabulous as the photos.
On the allotted morning I put on more make-up than the queen of drag Ru Paul and walked there from my hotel in sneakers, changing to heels before I rang the bell. (I know the drill, I’ve seen Working
Girl.) Tragically, and I suppose obviously, ‘‘he’’ never showed up – it was his people, but the apartment was mighty, glamorous and sexy. There were silver airconditioning pipes on the ceiling, exposed metal girders, a rough wooden floor and huge windows overlooking the heart of Tribeca. It screamed New York, especially the southwest corner of the huge room which had been made into what ‘‘he’’ called the Zen Area – floor cushions, hookah pipes, Buddha statues and industrial-strength incense. It was a proper old warehouse conversion – but in a fabulously modern way it had Taylor Swift living above so the property came with ridiculously good-looking bodyguards. It was perfect.
I was overjoyed – and then, as it tends to, reality bit. God I hate reality – it does get in the way of dreams: the reality is that there will be eight of us living there – and only two are real people. The three children (and probably the three pets) want to have as many walls as possible between us and them. They don’t want to sleep open plan, they want to lie to our faces and say they’re going to their rooms to do homework, while they play banned video games. They don’t want me lounging on a Japanese cushion alongside Zooey Deschanel with a take-away from Nobu – they want me overcooking them pasta pesto in a recognisable kitchen before they go upstairs to bed and then don’t go to bed. And the idea of listening to Burt Bacharach on the omnisound-system, rather than having a private commune with Lamb Of God, would make them hurl.
So I said goodbye to the loft, T-Swizzle and the bodyguards, and found a regular house – rather like our one in London, but with fewer posters of DevilDriver on the walls. It’s lovely – and friendly – and feels familiar. In the words of Paul Simon in The
Boxer – that classic song about coming to New York full of unrealistic dreams – ‘‘After changes upon changes we are more or less the same’’. Not what I had imagined for our adventure – but then in all honesty I don’t know Tina Fey’s number and I don’t think I ever will.
Emma and her partner Richard Curtis are swapping London for a year in New York – for her there is only one dream home, but will her family allow it?