Inside stories
A new book offers a glimpse at the city’s wildest interiors
NEW Yorkers are unabashedly nosy, especially when it comes to other people’s homes. Wendy Goodman is a native, so she knows this all too well. As New York magazine’s design editor — with roles at Harper’s Bazaar, House & Garden and others before that — she’s spent three decades chronicling the city’s most fabulous spaces.
Her new book with Abrams, “May I Come In?” is out Sept. 25, and its glossy pages shine with photos of the glorious residences she’s been privy to. A delightful bonus: charming behind-the-scenes tales of how Goodman has found and wooed homeowners to participate in her stories.
The celebrities who’ve granted her access range from Richard Avedon to Donatella and Gianni Versace. Here, we highlight a few of the zaniest spaces among Goodman’s greatest hits.
Polish artist Agata Oleksiak is better known as Olek and best known as a “yarnbomber.” She went from knitting clothes for her Barbies as a child to covering urban structures from lampposts to Wall Street’s “Charging Bull” statue with crocheted patterns. A decade after moving to Brooklyn in 2000, Olek recreated her Park Slope studio apartment at Christopher Henry Gallery in Nolita. Every item in it, from the walls to a teapot, has a yarn cozy; it became a crash pad. “When I asked Olek where she slept during the show, she said she slept in the gallery, as she wanted to be in her own bed, which was crocheted in toto, naturally,” Goodman recalls of the 2011 shoot.
Another memorable character is George Venson, an artist who hand-paints wallpaper and fabric under his label Voutsa. His 275-square-foot Chinatown “hole-in-the-wall” — profiled in 2015 — is ablaze in riotous color, including a kitchen he embellished with snakes in lime green and red hues. “As he told me then, ‘I just knew I could transform it into a little tree house.’ And transform it he did,” Goodman writes. “Every square inch was covered in Voutsa wallpaper and fabric.” A transplant from San Antonio, Texas, who last week opened a showroom in the New York Design Center at 200 Lexington Ave., Venson also designed a shirt of exotic flora in the same bold pattern as his bedroom’s wall covering.
Meanwhile, the Park Slope duplex of James Aguiar, fashion director for Modern Luxury magazine, and Mark Haldeman, a regional manager for Paul Smith, is a fantastical place where, Goodman marvels, “Gucci and Target peacefully coexist.” Their emerald green library has wallpaper (and on the ceiling, too!) with the intricate swirls of a malachite crystal. There’s ermine fur upholstery, a dripping chandelier and an orange carpet that pops.
Some subjects took more legwork. “I stalked artist Misha Kahn for years, waiting to pounce when the time was right,” Goodman says. He “was pretty much allergic to anything that is not highly original, exquisitely unique and pulsing with color, just like the furniture he creates.” The Greenpoint rental he shares with boyfriend Nick Haramis, editor-in-chief of Interview magazine, is kooky, with a couch of shaggy fur, a dining table made from rubber and a cabinet covered in the scaly skin of Amazonian fish. In the kitchen, seemingly haphazard brushstrokes adorn the cabinets and floor tiles.
Meanwhile, in the two-bedroom Rockaway retreat that interior designer Benjamin Noriega-Ortiz shares with his partner, lighting guru Steven Wine, a portrait of Marie Antoinette as a teenager dictated the color scheme. Her dress is Tiffany blue; the living room where the painting hangs is, too. Her cheeks are flushed, so the master bedroom is a vivid pink, with blush carpets, a furry blanket and a leafy light fixture in deep rose. “The queen commands the apartment,” Noriega-Ortiz told Goodman. “Even when we’re not here, the place is not empty.”