For Hearst Home’s 2008 Designer Visions event, designers Charlotte Moss and McAlpine, Booth & Ferrier worked with Tufenkian’s New York showroom to transform two three-bedroom Manhattan apartments.
The showhouse spotlights the vision of four designers, each selected by a different Hearst Home magazine to decorate one apartment in New York City’s The Laurel Condominiums.
Moss, tapped for the job by Veranda, is using Tufenkian’s Twilight IV Grey Pond, Sebastia Fawn and Jozan Glacier carpets. House Beautiful’s apartment, designed by McAlpine, Booth & Ferrier, will be decorated with Tufenkian’s Tempo Ice, Flipside Water and Low Tides Raincloud carpets.
November 6-December 28
The Laurel Condominiums
400 East 67th St, 9th Floor
New York, NY 10065
For more information, visit DesignerVisionsOnline.com
“Moss in Manhattan”
Much like Lucy HoneyChurch in E.M. Forster’s classic novel, Manhattan-based designer Charlotte Moss knows the value of having A Room With a View. But instead of the Arno River outside a pensione in Florence, it is a view of a lofty church spire in Manhattan that inspired the designer to create the latest Veranda show house at The Laurel, a new luxury condominium building on the city’s Upper East Side. As one of four residences decorated under the aegis of magazines within the Hearst Corporation, the two-bedroom unit was conceived as a New York pied-a-terre for a couple who met in Rome and married in the hills of Tuscany, blending the historicism of the Italian countryside with their new, urban lifestyle.
Known for a signature style that embraces traditional elegance and comfort, Moss transforms the modern space into a landscape of Euro sensibilities with the use of warm colors, lush fabrics, old documents and decorative objects gathered on countless trips to flea markets and tiny antique shops. “After seeing the terra-cotta roof of the church next door,” says Moss, “I immediately thought ‘Italy’ and wanted to bring the same warmth and classicism into the apartment.” Deep persimmon sofas, leather dining chairs and Tuscan hues permeate the living room dominated by two oversize oil paintings of Venice and Rome. Large paisley panels imposed over a small-scale check upholster walls, borrowing a classic technique from the late Renzo Mongiardino, a master of mood-setting illusions.
Gilded frames and urns fill brackets along the walls, while a collection of small dioramas depicts Italian ports, great piazzas and gardens of Europe. “All of the little narratives around the room tell a story and reflect the couple’s travels and interests,” says Moss.
Throughout, layers of fabrics, carpets and wallpapers add texture to rooms. In the kitchen, cork walls bring warmth to the austere setting of marble countertops and stainless steel appliances. Framed photographs from Villa Pisani are proudly displayed on silver leaf paper in the powder room. custom wallpaper made from eighteenth-century architectural engravings from Le Rouge creates a seamless flow in the entryway.
For the husband’s study, Moss creates a masculine, neoclassical setting in the second bedroom with black and white engravings of Rome. custom decorative panels displaying nineteenth-century-style fragments of wood, marble and semiprecious stones hang against dramatic, bronze-painted walls offset by simple cream-colored curtains and furnishings.
By stark contrast, the master bedroom is an ode to femininity with painted furniture toile fabric and a soft palette of blues, aquas and beige. An iron canopy bed, draped in an opulent silk and covered with crisp, white linens, floats in the center of the room as the church rises majestically outside the window. Small paintings of Paris next to the armoire remind the couple, once again, of their romantic beginnings in Europe. Says Moss, “Whether the view is outside the window or through a picture, there is always something in this apartment that draws you in and transports you.”
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