BROOKE SHIELDS
Take a peek at the NY townhouse of one of Hollywood’s most-loved.
Every room in Brooke Shields’s fourstorey New York townhouse has what she calls “a cherry” —that “one thing I really didn’t want to live without, the one thing I splurged on.” In the living room it’s the stone mantel she and her architect rescued from the Plaza Hotel after the property was refurbished in the mid-2000s; in the dining room it’s the hand-blocked wallpaper; and in her light-filled kitchen it’s the custom-made marbletopped dining table, inspired by a baker’s cart that Shields, 52, spotted in Europe. “If you look underneath it,” she points out, “you can see it’s never moving. It’s bolted to the ground.”
Shields searched for years before finding the historic five-bedroom house in 2009; she shares it with husband Chris Henchy, 53, a screenwriter and producer ( Bachelorette, The Boss), and their daughters, Rowan, 14, and Grier, 11. The latest additions to the elegant set of rooms are a series of large-scale bird photographs by Australian artist Leila Jeffreys, to whom Shields has become both a friend and patron. “They’re just extraordinary. They’re so human, and they’re all named,” says the actress, guest-starring on Law & Order: SVU. (Skye watches over the kitchen; Neville perches behind the living room bar.) “Leila gets the birds to sort of perfectly fluff up and look at her. They’re modelling for her,” Shields adds with a laugh. In addition to complementing the eclectic interiors, the feathered art provides a connection to nature, something that Shields is lucky to have in her neighbourhood. “Even in the heart of New York City,” she says, “we open the French doors, and in the little backyard, we hear the birds.”
Mackenzie Schmidt
“I need colour. To me it brings life into a room” —Brooke Shields