Mish Tworkowski s Globally Chic NYC Pied à Terre HOUSE TOUR

We fell in love with the space because it's a dollhouse version of a grand apartment. My partner Joseph and I are both preservationists at heart. We didn't want to move to a beautiful pre-war building and then suddenly want a big white box. And I'm sentimental. I love to take things that kind of trigger memories. And every time you look around the room, you see everything that you love. I think home, it's sort of where your heart sings. It's a very special place. Hi, Homeworthy. I'm Miesch Tworkowski. Welcome to my apartment in New York City. Please come on in. Hi, I'm Miesch Tworkowski. I'm a jewelry designer and welcome to my home in New York City. We own the apartment for probably 20 years. And when we first saw it, it was love at first sight. The building we're in was always my favorite building in New York City. It has a beautiful facade with double height rooms. And when we got it, it was a little bit of a wreck. So we knew we needed to do a renovation, but we fell in love with the space. The apartment hasn't changed dramatically. Any kind of renovation that we would undertake in the apartment, we knew it was more about restoration than changing things. We knew anything that we were going to change needed to be done in a very sensitive way. So for instance, we changed the kitchen and the bathrooms, which, you know, function is also important in an apartment. Joseph is a big cook, so we knew the kitchen had to work well. And we all want modern bathrooms, but everything else, the woodwork, everything, we were very careful to bring it back to what it was. Welcome to my living room. This is one of my favorite rooms in the house. Obviously, having this incredibly high ceiling in New York City is a sort of a wonderful special thing to have. And the tracery that's in the ceiling is incredible. It's original, and we spent a lot of time restoring it. And the room just feels like it's a big English hall. We filled it with a lot of special things. The coffee table, for instance, has these incredible, they're really salesman-sized gems, which I loved. I found it at the Steyr Auction Gallery in Hudson, New York. And it made me very happy to think maybe some jewelry collector or some geologist had them. And I love looking at them every day, being a jewelry designer. And I love petrified wood. And these are very special pieces, the piece on the table, and also the bookends that are behind the Japanese cherry blossoms we got at the Tucson Gem Show when we were hunting for gems to make jewelry. And on the mantle, I always love to have a little bit of charm. These are actually antique honey jars that turn into a bank. And Joseph always loves saving pennies, quarters, and things, and then he rolls them. And I thought they would be adorable for him to have. These cool things, which they're actually nutcrackers. We've always had a wonderful dog, and we bought these when we had our lab, Moby. So those were special Christmas presents for Joseph. And then all of these paintings, they were all bought at different times. I worked at Sotheby's for a long time, so they were things that I fell in love with and had to have. We used to have a house in Aspen, so we bought a lot of this sort of contemporary art from a wonderful gallery there called Baldwin Gallery. And this is Alexis Rockman, who's very talented, and we admire so much of his work. And way up there, these we really love. They are sort of these natural copper splatters that we bought at a gem show, and they're from Michigan. And we saw them, they were in a box underneath a stone dealer's booth, and we were like, oh my god, what are those? They're so big. And when he showed them to us, we were like, oh my god, we had to have them. Perfect for a jewelry designer. And we were just designing this space, and we decided they look great splattered all around the room. The carpet, by the way, which we also bought at Sotheby's, it's called a Garden of Life carpet. So being a big gardener, I kind of was like, wow, I have to have that. And very cool colors. I love sort of the sky blue, and it's actually what determined the wall color. We worked with a really great friend, Katie Ritter, who's a super talented interior designer and has been a friend my whole life. So she's a great colorist and loves color like I do. So we worked on the special wall color and all the kind of blues that were brought in. The painting is by Donald Sultan, who's also a friend of ours. And when we saw it, we loved, because you know, we have this big huge wall, we love the idea of having one big painting. And it's clearly, it's red roses, and we have a beautiful rose garden in Millbrook. So we thought, oh my god, that's really perfect. And we always love having big branches here, because we have this soaring ceiling. Whatever time of year, it's always nice to have something that's blooming and kind of, it feels like you're going under a tree. There are a number of special things, like this is Alexandra Knoll, who's a wonderful sculptor. And for a while, I actually worked in the 20th century works of art department at Sotheby's, and when I was much younger, and it was a, an artist that we would sell there. And I love lusterware too. And these are particularly nice. I'm a big pink fan. And I love walking by it and always brings a big smile to my face. Over here, we have John Alexander, who's another wonderful artist, another friend, it's always nice to be surrounded with, with friends and kind of adds happiness to, to your life. Here is another friend whom we admire his work. His name is Dan Ostermiller, who's an incredible sculptor who specializes in animals. So there's the camel here, there's a wonderful elephant on the window, very charming. And this table is very, very special. It's actually almost as if a jeweler did it. It has all of this incredible Mother of Pearl and abalone inlay. I bought it at Cove Landing, and the man who owns Cove Landing, Angus Wilkie, is an incredible scholar in terms of furniture and objet. And he thinks it came from a sort of important house in England. I just love all the fine detail. It really is like a fine piece of jewelry. And we love Robert Kime. Unfortunately, he passed away recently. But those are his fabrics. And the beautiful lantern is also designed by him. So in this corner, we have this wonderful doorframe, which is a false doorframe set with a mirror. And it was actually Katie Ritter, our friend Katie, who was like, God, it would be nice to balance the doorway on the other side with this mirror. And it kind of opened up the entire room. In front of it is this really quirky sort of 19th century stool. I actually used to spend a lot of time in New Orleans. And when I saw it, I was like, oh, my God, you always need a little piece of sort of sophisticated kitsch in your life. So we obviously reupholstered it. But it's a very ornate little thing. You can almost have Marie Antoinette sitting on it. These leather chairs, which I love. I think I mentioned I'm sentimental. These were from my parents' house. And I always like to have a little something that reminds me of my past. This is sort of a special little collection that Joseph actually gave me one Christmas. He bought it from an antique dealer who actually didn't know what they were. And then it's kind of fun for us because so many people come over and they're like, oh, my God, I love those. What are they? And we're always like, can you tell us? We should guess. They're clearly some industrial workshop kind of implement. But we just love them as little pieces of sculpture on the table. Next to it, we took them an amazing trip to Egypt. And we were so in love with it. We thought it was one of the best trips that we had ever taken. And I wanted to find something that was very jewelry like when we were there. So this is lapis and turquoise and very special. And then when I came back, I actually started buying little paintings that were also inspired by Egypt, just to help us remember the wonderful trip we had taken together. This little sculpture, which I think was actually meant to hang on a wall, but I love it really just sitting here on a table. It was actually designed by a gentleman who did a lot of framing for us. And we had a wonderful relationship. And one day he was like, would you look at my artwork that I make? And we looked at this and we were like, oh, my God, it's just kind of a wonderful piece. And of course, I love to work with metal myself. So I thought, why don't we put a little something on that table? My life as a jewelry designer began in a very lovely, simple way. Friends of my family had this incredible jewelry business that did every aspect of jewelry making. So as a boy, literally a boy, you know, I was in grammar school, I would go and work with them on summer vacations during Christmas time. And I learned about every aspect of jewelry making. And then I started making jewelry as a hobby. And then once I graduated college, my first job, I worked for Sotheby's. And when I was there, it was actually my co-workers and their moms at that time wanted to buy the jewelry. And I was like, wow, this could really be a business. So it really took off from there. So that was my initial life as a jewelry designer. Wow, look who's hidden in here. Hey, how are you? It's our great friend, Robert Rufino. I think everyone knows the legendary editor, stylist, one of Joseph and I closest friends. When I was coming up from Palm Beach, Robert was like, oh my God, we have to make sure that the apartment is ready for Homeworthy. So he came in and helped me get everything organized. We started out in the flower market, picking all the flowers that we love. And we have very similar tastes. Robert was like, what's your favorite flowers? Let's make sure we include them. And then he worked on these beautiful arrangements. So we feel very lucky to have Robert in our lives. So Mish and I have known each other about 40 years. When I first met Mish, after using his jewelry on many different shoots and ad campaigns, there was a cocktail party and a dinner at Barney's and at that time I was working for Kerry Donovan at the New York Times and I was very friendly with the girl in public relations at Barney's. Oh, you have to meet Mish. So I walked through the first floor and there was this guy in a beautiful beige suit with a bow tie and his hair parted down to here and beard. I said, you're Mish? You look like a lawyer. And a few weeks later we had dinner and then we just started this great relationship with this great friendship. And you know, we've been through happy times, sad times, and we've been together as good friends for many, many, many years. Do you still think I look like a lawyer? No. Good. You're a lot more interesting than a lawyer. So we both really grew up in New York during the 80s and 90s. Those were the most amazing times in New York City. So much was happening. New York was at such a high. So many great things were opening. I don't know how you felt about it, Robert. Well, I grew up, I'm a little older than Mish, let's put it that way. So I grew up in the 70s or in the 70s, you know, I had my first big job designing windows and the energy of New York was totally different. It was, you know, Studio 54, Central Park, Madison Avenue. It was a whole different freedom, the way people dress. The energy was totally different. But you know, everything changes and you have to go with the change. And there was also all these great places downtown which are now incredibly expensive. They're the most expensive parts of Manhattan now. But when I was young, you would sneak down there so your parents wouldn't know you were going there and you would go to some great club and you'd be like, oh my God, I hope I can get a taxi out of there. Now, you know, of course, it's where all the like $50 million apartments are. So very, very changed times. But everything moves forward, which is a wonderful thing. I mean, I grew up on the outskirts of Chinatown and Soho was not really Soho. And you're going, you know, my parents used to freak out saying, oh, I'm going to this place called Soho. That's dangerous. What are you doing? And now look at Soho. It's just packed with great shops and restaurants. I have to put in a good word for Soho. I was there yesterday and there were so many incredible new stores. But I walked around and I'm like, oh my God, it's like London. There's so many fancy stores in Soho now. Our day yesterday began around 7.45. I immediately got coffee and then I need coffee always. And we started going up and down 28th Street. What I usually do is I go to a couple of vendors I like the most and see what they have and then think about what would look best in the apartment. And we did a little shopping. That's what we did. And we had the best time and we came back with these huge bundles. I was afraid that the Uber would not be able to take us because we have like branches basically sticking out the back of the car. But we made it. We made it back to the apartment. And then the magic started happening. This painting, which takes up an entire wall of our dining room, is very special to us. And it has a wonderful story. So Joseph found this painting in a wonderful auction catalog. And we just loved the whole idea of it, that it's kind of flowers underwater. There is like a salmon swimming above like irises and gladioli. And then all of a sudden there's a hummingbird in it. So we thought, oh my God, great for our dining room. And then we realized that it was painted by a man named William Dunlop. And a big light went off in our head, a very dear friend of ours who sadly passed away, Julia Reed, who was the incredible writer at Vogue. William Dunlop was a friend of hers. And we actually became familiar with his work in Mississippi when we would go down and visit Julia's family. So it kind of brought everything together in a very special way for us. The idea behind this dining room was to create a room that was actually more livable. When we first moved into the apartment, we had it as a very proper dining room with a big table in the center and a chandelier. And we ended up never using it. So when we renovated the apartment, we decided, let's make it a little bit more special, a little more fun, a little more interesting. And speaking with Katie Ritter, we actually moved the table into the corner and created a banquette, which we now use all the time. And we love sitting there. And then we created this wonderful library part of the dining room. We have these 19th century French bookcases. They were in a French library. And we built them into the wall. And then we created this whole kind of reading nook that we love to sit here. The light is really beautiful. And it's so wonderful. We actually use the books now. So it makes it a happy place. The bookcase in our dining room has so many little special things. I actually love to collect little paintings. Both of these belong to Bunny Melon. And we bought it at the Bunny Melon sale at Sotheby's. And again, they're botanical, something that we love. And I love a lot of Asian things. So these Chinese lanterns. There's one here as well as one on the other side. Joseph gave me one Christmas. And we light them up during dinners. And we also love putting things in between the books. It makes the bookshelf so much more interesting. Again, another two little wonderful objects from Cove Landing. That's Joseph's iguana lamp, which he's in love with. He bought it at an auction online. We're both big online auction groupies. And then another very special little painting by an artist called Fleur Coles, who created Flair Magazine. We have quite a number of her pieces. And a beautiful little dove, which we love. A picture of our dog, Moby, which I had shown you the Labrador nutcrackers earlier. So that's the actual person that, person, a dog is a person. It's actually the sort of inspiration for many of the dog things that you'll find in the apartment. Joseph and I always loved pink rooms. And we thought that a dining room is the perfect place to sort of use that color. And over here, we have a collection of paintings that we love. This is Philip Taft, who's a wonderful contemporary painter. And then again, Donald Salton. I love morning glories, and we grow a lot of them in the country. So we asked Donald if he ever would do a morning glory painting. So that we love very, very much. And we didn't want to do curtains because we thought it made it a little too fussy. So we worked with Katie, and we did these beautiful shutters that were inset with this incredible fabric. Again, as you know, I'm not afraid of color. So wonderful pinks and blues and purples, much like these beautiful Bergers, which have incredible fabric on the outside, and then that kind of yummy purple velvet on the inside. This table, which is in the dining room, we also bought at Cove Landing, and has a wonderful bouquet of bicolor lilacs on it. We love to grow lilacs. But it's this wonderful sort of specimen table of all these mixed marbles and agates. And I love the bronze base, which has all that great kind of tree form trunk and roots. Up on the top shelf is one of the, I think, most fun pieces in the house. When my first job out of college, I actually worked as a rock and roll memorabilia artist at Sotheby's. I was doing jewelry as a hobby at that time. And I helped work on and create this ArtAid auction that was a parallel to the LiveAid auction. And this was actually a lot that was in the ArtAid sale. Lots of fun. We've hosted many wonderful dinners at this table, and changing the dining room to have a banquette and to sort of sit in the corner kind of creates this very cozy feeling. And it actually makes people want to stay longer. You know, you kind of feel like you're having dinner at a dining table, but then it's turning into a little bit of like a nightclub afterwards because you're in this great corner and this beautiful color leather on the banquette. Very special space. And we always love to have like a big, wonderful flower arrangement. I love parrot tulips. And I love, as you can tell, a kind of lime green color. So those are very, very special flowers to me. We love buying paintings all the time. And a lot of times we will buy them just because we love them and put them into storage or actually keep them in a file cabinet. So one day maybe we'll decide to frame it and create another kind of wall moment. These are special to us, particularly these two paintings. They're by an artist named Robert Hornstein, and he was a friend of ours, uncle. And he was this sort of La Dolce Vita painter in Italy. And we just love the surreal quality of them. I love shells. So that is a very wonderful kind of still life. And then the Swiss cheese is just lots of fun. So perfect for a dining room. And then over here, we have another great wall of paintings. Joseph loves cityscapes. He loves the sort of New York feeling of like little paintings. This is an artist called Betty Tompkins, which was actually one of the first things I bought as a young man. And I just love having a dog portrait in a room. It kind of brings a smile. And then this was actually a friend of He's very talented. And then one day I sort of found it in a closet. And I'm like, oh my god, we're renovating it. It deserves to have a place of honor in the apartment. Over here in the corner, we have two sets of Meissen plates. And it was a rather narrow spot in the dining room. And being maximalists, of course, we wanted something to go into it. And we had these plates, which are beautiful, but we never use them. So we thought, oh my god, how beautiful just to look at them. So we hung them and they ended up becoming one of the our favorite decorative features of the room. And above, we have a really great patterned ceiling. And I always think in a dining room, it's nice to have something sort of interesting when you look up because so often you're seated. And you know, if your eye wanders, it's nice to see something up there. It makes the room much cozier. I think I told you I love color. So when we were thinking, what color should we paint all the woodwork, seeing that we want color, I thought, oh my god, this great red would be beautiful. Katie Ritter agreed. She found it for us. So it kind of ties the room together. And it works really, really well when we transition into our purple kitchen. I spent decades in New York City. And then right before COVID, we were going to move to Palm Beach, where we already had a house. The transition was very interesting for me as a jewelry designer. I think any move you make in life, whether it's a permanent move, or even if you're purchasing a second house, all of those give you second childhoods. Suddenly, you're in a space that allows you to be more curious, refocus your thoughts. So it's inevitable that the move to Palm Beach would suddenly open a new world to me. I'm a passionate gardener. So being able to garden year-round was very exciting. And learning all about all the new tropical foliage. And I started studying about orchids, which then led to a really great orchid collection a few seasons ago. And then there's just the incredible light that Palm Beach has. It's such vibrant, pure light. So every color is much sharper. And I'm a big colorist, which you'll see in the apartment. So those things had great impact on my work. This wonderful red door transitions beautifully into our purple kitchen. This is our pantry. It's always nice to have a pantry in an apartment, because when you're serving the food into the dining room, it's nice to have a place to organize yourself. We also made this function as a little desk area. Sometimes I sit here and I do my notes. But we have a big collection of tableware, plates, glasses. I love collecting them. So there's some of them out here, which we would use in a dinner party. And we love to force bulbs in the winter. So these are all 19th century bulb forcing glasses. Above, these are all for glasses and little objects. Joseph is a former architect, so he designed the whole space. He loves to put beautiful metal inserts into cabinets. These are particularly good because you could kind of see what's inside without having to make what's inside. It could be a little messy if you want. So they kind of hide everything, which is great. And then above, there's a frieze of beautiful tulip paintings by one of our favorite artists, Rory McEwan. And he is an incredible botanical artist, and it's nice to look up and see them. We're going from the pantry into the kitchen. We love the idea of having a purple kitchen. So it's a rather elegant purple color. We love the floor, which is a purple and gray checkerboard. So sometimes we smile that maybe we have the only purple kitchen in New York, but it makes us very happy. And then inside, we have another part of our tableware collections. We have a large collection of something called restaurantware, which were things that were made in sort of the 1910, 20s, 30s, 40s. They were actually used in restaurants, but now, you know, a hundred years later, they're actually considered very special and very collectible. This is one of our favorites. It's called, as you can guess, lei, because it's a Hawaiian lei. And it was done by a company called Vernon Kilns. And it's very special because it was designed for Pan Am when Pan Am started doing first class air trips to Hawaii. So it was actually designed to sort of feed special people as they were making their first journeys to beautiful Hawaii. Now we're in sort of the proper part of the kitchen, which, by the way, looks very neat. That's because Joseph is not here, sadly. He's the cook in the family. So I am not a cook. I live vicariously through Joseph loving this kitchen. And I make a lot of coffee. So that's kind of do all day long. That's kind of hidden away. But when we were planning this kitchen, you know, Joseph laid everything out. So it functioned perfectly, and it was the right size stove for him. He's 6'5". So the counters are actually a little bit higher to make it easy for him to cook. He is a huge fan of subway tile. So every one of our kitchens always has subway tile in it. And I had mentioned that we love purple. Our whole life is purple. But we actually thought it would be nice to do two different tones and put the lighter tone on the top so that the room had a very airy feel. Obviously, nice also to have a window in your kitchen in New York City. So it makes the whole space happy. This is our stair hall, which is another one of my favorite spots in the apartment. In fact, it's what emotionally sold it to me because it made it feel like it was a house. You know, you have a staircase and it's sort of charming and you come down. Every time I come through this room, I just smile. And it's also hung with a lot of our botanical work. We collect botanical paintings. Every home we have is kind of packed with them. They bring great joy. And if we come over here, this wall has many different kinds of botanical work. We have things that are contemporary. We're asking artists now to paint a flower we love. And then we have things that are actually 16th century. So we run the full gamut. There's sort of some very special ones here. This one was done by Jean Cocteau, which we bought at Sotheby's. A Cecil Beaton, which we also bought from an auction house. But it's mixed with pansies and roses, 19th century, 20th century. These are by Graham Rust, who's a wonderful English artist who actually loves to paint daffodils and jonquils. We love staring at this all day long. And over here is one of the prizes in our collection. It's by an artist named Rory McEwan, who is considered the finest botanical artist of the 20th century. He sadly passed away quite young, so his work is rare. We recently helped bring a traveling exhibition to America of Rory McEwan's work. And this is really a masterpiece. It's watercolor on vellum, which, you know, you can't make a single mistake. Otherwise, you need to basically start over again. On this wall, there's charming 19th century rose paintings done by an American artist. They were often done by women working at home. Wonderful magnolia buds. Again, a wonderful Graham Rust of opening cabbage roses. And then even little charming things we find. This is sort of a Christmas card from the 1930s that was done of a blossoming topiary, which we thought was charming. So we decided that we would frame it. Above is this incredible mistletoe chandelier. We found this on a trip to Paris, fell in love with it, and just thought, oh my God, it would hang so perfectly here. And obviously, if you move under here, I get a kiss. So I always like that. And then going up the staircase, by the way, the runner is a custom made runner that Katie Ritter had done for us. There's some really wonderful, more autumnal paintings. We also try to buy things that, not only that we love, but, you know, have an importance to them. I'm on the board of the New York Botanical Garden, and the American Botanical Artists Association is based there. And they often have juried shows. This beautiful kind of peeling birch actually won an award. Kind of nice to have those things in your collection, too. This wonderful table, we also bought from Cove Landing. I also love things with a provenance. So this came from sort of an important collection on Long Island, and it is black lacquer, beautiful hormelou mounts. Actually, one of my earliest jewelry collections, I studied 18th century French furniture mounts. So I love those kind of details. Very special. And then these modern sculptures that you see around the apartment, most of them are from a man named Bertoia, who I love to have that little kind of pop of modern kind of thrown in. And he was very organically inspired, too. A lot of these are like exploding daffodils and kind of have wonderful organic imagery. Over here, we have our powder room, and you could see no one's inside because there's a little open sign. A wonderful friend of mine, Jordan Saunders, makes these, and it makes me think of her when I see them. By the way, all of the doorknobs, we were very careful to save all the original knobs. And we even went around the building when they were doing renovations and asked if they weren't using their doorknobs, if they would give them to us so that everyone in the apartment would be original. Now we're going inside, and there's a wonderful Schumacher wallpaper. I love all the crazy bright color. I'm a big fan of pineapples. So lots and lots of fun going on. We created this powder room, actually, it was a closet, and we traded space with a maid's room that was in the kitchen for it. And so we obviously needed a small custom sink, which Joseph designed, beautiful marble. And then there's a Scandinavian root mirror, because, again, we love everything that is organic. This was a painting that I've had my entire life. It's very peaceful. I always love looking at it. Maybe I knew that I was going to be in love with stones and crystals right there. And a wonderful pagoda. I did a whole collection of pagodas early on in my career. I love Asian aesthetic. I think of my jewelry design as being traditional with like a huge dollop of whimsy, or traditional with a big modern twist. I like to make jewelry that makes a woman feel beautiful. I'm not someone who likes shock value jewelry, if that's a proper description. So I want a woman to put something on and feel, wow, it's making me feel just great and really beautiful. And I feel my home is a lot like that, too. I love beautiful furnishings. I love traditional things. But I also like to give it a twist. Maybe it's a contemporary painting mixed with a piece of 18th century furniture. Something that just makes you kind of stand up and say, wow, I'm glad those two things live together. I grew up between New Jersey and New York. So I'm a bit of a local boy for New York City. And I was always creative. I always loved to make things and get messy. I was a big painter. And then I love making pottery. I gardened my whole life. I had parents that loved to garden. So that was a wonderful thing for me. I think as a child, you know, having a parent that sort of allows you just to experiment. I laugh that I baked so many sculptures in my mom's oven that if she didn't do that, I probably never would turn into a jewelry designer. But I had a creative upbringing, which I feel very blessed for. Now we're going to head upstairs to the primary bedroom. I just came up the staircase in our stair hall. And there's some wonderful little moments here. The two paintings are by Alexis Rockman, the same person who did the big Paris underwater painting in the living room. We love them because they're just sort of bees buzzing around flowers. And again, it makes us feel the garden is inside our apartment. The boxes which are on the shelf are very special. Joseph actually makes them. He collects paint by numbers. And what he does is he then cuts them into cubes and forms these boxes. And if you're lucky, you get one as a present if you're a good friend. And then again, there's wonderful botanicals. This is a painter called Gary Bukovnik, who Joseph loves. And in fact, we have maybe 10 or 12 of his work. Joseph's always looking for one. There are always these large scale flowers. Very wonderful. So this is another grouping of botanical works that we have collected over the years, some very special things here. This is by an artist named Laura Woodward. And she is one of the first artists to actually go to Florida. And a woman at that time was even kind of a crazier notion. So late 19th century, she went to Florida to paint the landscapes, the flora of Florida, really, like, basically, when the train started going there, when Henry Flagler started bringing the train line down and creating what we know as Florida today. This is another favorite artist of ours. Her name is Regine Hagedorn. And she does these beautiful detailed paintings of not only the flower, but parts of the flower, which are very special. This is a drawing Joseph did for me. And I always save every one of his drawings. He makes birthday cards and Christmas cards. They're some of my biggest treasure. So I love to frame some of them. This is a photograph of cherry blossoms. It's funny that we have cherry blossoms downstairs in the living room. This is one of the first things Joseph gave me on like one of our maybe our first date. This is outside his apartment. So that's a very special photo. This is a wonderful botanical artist, Graham Rust, that I actually asked for him to do a watercolor of a very special brooch that I designed. It's a lotus blossom that has all these wonderful diamonds, and then the lid lifts up, and you have a secret stone inside. Over here, we often will go and buy a group of watercolors at an auction, hoping that inside, you know, sometimes there's 10, 20 things that inside will find one jewel. This is one that we actually really, really loved. It's sort of a little gnome with a little December calendar. Very charming, which is also important. It's nice that things make you smile and be happy. Now we're in the primary bedroom. I know I keep saying that every room was my favorite room, but you know, there's so many spots throughout the apartment that really make us very happy. This is a very special room. The walls, of course, we love purple. We know that already. And this was a beautiful English fabric that was turned into wallpaper, which Katie did a beautiful job helping us with. And then we decided that we wanted to make this kind of wonderful little sitting area so that we can kind of cuddle up with a book. This chair, which I've had almost my whole life, is very special. One of my first apartments, when I moved to New York, they left one piece of furniture and it was this chair. And it was actually white. And I was like, oh my God, it's so beautiful. It's exotic. You know, it sort of has that kind of wonderful Anglo-Indian feel. I flipped it over and the chair actually came from Sister Parish. So I thought, oh my God, that's such a great sign. And then a friend of mine from Sotheby's, who's a furniture expert, said, oh my God, that paint's not original. So we stripped it back to the ebonized wood and then put a Fortuny fabric over it. These tables, they're by Caprone Frere. Again, they have wonderful sort of inset leaves, which I, of course, love. This was one of my first big purchases when I worked at Sotheby's. It came from the 20th Century Works of Art sale. And that has also followed me almost my whole life. The bookcases we actually added so that we would have this wonderful, warm, this is our home kind of feeling. Then moving over here, we love Swedish furniture. We actually have it in a number of our homes. So it always works well because the light color, you can just kind of put anywhere in it. Even in a smallish room, it sort of looks beautiful, but also sort of disappears. Again, a few special pieces. This also came from Sotheby's by an artist named Ben Shaw, who's a rather wonderful painter. Joseph loves birding and loves birds. So we're always looking for really wonderful depictions of our feathered friends. Speaking of friends, this is another friend of ours, Claire Potter, who is an incredible ceramicist. She loves flowers. Her things are so incredibly beautiful, beautifully done. It's unbelievable that that whole thing is sort of done by hand and so delicate. We love English oak and actually have a big collection of this type of work. These were obviously probably julep cups, but we use them for pens and rulers. You know, being a jeweler, you need lots of places to constantly stick stuff. Again, Ormolu mounts from 18th century French furniture. Some of these were my earliest inspiration in jewelry design. I love sort of how the flowers are articulated and I love garlands of organic material. Christopher Spitzmiller is also a friend of ours. I think, I guess this whole area is friends, but he makes such great lamps. Love the chartreuse color. And pretty much throughout the house, you'll see Christopher's things. It's always nice to think that a friend actually threw that beautiful piece of ceramics. So this wonderful painting is by an artist named Shirley Russell. And Joseph and I love Hawaii. In fact, we went two and three times a year for 20 years and just treasure the culture of Hawaii, the beauty of the people, the landscape is so inspirational. It's one of the most beautiful places on earth. So we love the artists that were inspired by Hawaii. This is a rather early mainland artist that went to Hawaii, set up in Hawaii, and then would paint all the things that inspired her. And this, believe it or not, it looks very abstract, but it's really a painting of upland hydrangea. And the wonderful thing about Hawaii, particularly the big island of Hawaii, that island has 11 of the 14 climate zones that are in the world. So in fact, a tropical island on a higher elevation can have hydrangea growing. So we always love to think about that. So in both corners of the room, we have some very special watercolors. These belonged to Bunny Melon. Bunny Melon had a wonderful house that was on the island of Antigua in the Caribbean. And these are all Caribbean trees. So and I think we all know Bunny Melon was one of the great horticulturists that that lived and had the most wonderful horticultural library. So we feel we're very lucky to have these very special pieces. So in this bookcase, we kind of have a lot of wonderful little things. This is, believe it or not, it's a hose valve. I'm looking for the right word to describe it. So when we were at the top of the stair hall, when we first bought the apartment, there was actually a full firebox that was still in the wall of the apartment. Back kind of in the early 20th century, when they worried about fires happening in New York City, the hose was still intact. This is what attached it to the wall. It was painted over and did not look like this. Again, I had mentioned Joseph loves all of these sort of functioning objects and hardware. So he actually took this to our jewelry polisher and actually had it cleaned up and polished like a piece of jewelry so we could display it right here. So much fun. Every person asks, oh my God, what is that? Then there's a few other things. There's petrified wood, which is wonderful. This, believe it or not, is a prehistoric tooth from a horse, which is polished like a piece of jewelry. I kind of had imagined that I would make this into a piece of jewelry, but I realized no woman is going to want to wear something that heavy. So it became a present for Joseph. So it's a wonderful thing. This set of nesting tables. First, I want to say that little tables are the most wonderful thing anyone could have in their lives because you could just put so much on them. You can cluster them everywhere. If you're a reader, you put a book on it, you put a cup of coffee on it. But this set is very special because they belonged to Brook Astor and Sotheby's did the Brook Astor sale. We were fortunate to get a number of things from it. The painting on it is wonderful. It's bamboo, which I'm also a big fan of. Then in the bookcase, these inlay pieces, which are just so incredibly beautiful, are by Nancy Lorenz, who is a friend of ours and an incredibly talented artist whose career is skyrocketing. So we feel very fortunate to have them and we're very happy for Nancy. Then these vases are by Clarice Cliff. When I was younger, much younger, I actually studied for my art history degree in London. I would go to all the markets during the weekends. Clarice Cliff, or Clarice Cliff, however you want to say it, was a British potter. At that point, you could actually find these things in markets and now they've become valuable. I actually found them in a box hiding in a closet because probably soon after college, I didn't open those boxes. Glad I didn't throw them away. And then I put them into the bookshelf and they bring wonderful memories. The bed, which is very comfortable. Katie said we needed to have a bed by Charles Beckley. So and she was right. I don't think we ever had such an extravagant bed, but it was very nice gift to give ourselves. And again, it has sort of purple mohair, two tones, kind of makes us happy to always be in a purple world. All of the bedding is mattook, which is obviously very beautiful, but we are very friendly with Mindy and George Mattook. They're wonderful people. So it makes us even happier that we're sleeping on their handiwork. Again, we have this wonderful John Alexander painting, a little cheeky. It says fear of intimacy, kind of fun to put in a bedroom. And this is a little it looks almost like Joseph Cornell, but actually Joseph made this. And that's a picture of his grandfather inside, which is wonderful. This is again, we feel very lucky. It's a Rory McEwen drawing. And the very special thing about it is that it says for Brooke with love Rory and Brooke Astor was his aunt. So it's kind of wonderful that there's a gift for Brooke Astor on one side of the room and then Brooke Astor's phone tables on the other side of the room. Maybe she was using the phone table when Rory was calling her one day. So that's a very wonderful thing. There are still lots of scattered things on the floor. This is actually a 16th century old master painting. This is a wonderful sharp painting who was an incredible American painter who was one of the first artists that went west and did those great Grand Canyon paintings and all those kind of pre-photography. And that actually is a painting of Hawaii. And for Joseph's 40th birthday, we took the whole family to Hawaii. And I thought, oh, how nice to kind of give him a sharp painting of Hawaii to kind of commemorate the trip. This end table sat next to my dad's easy chair growing up. I looked at this table my entire life. And after my parents passed away, you know, again, I'm sentimental. I love to take things that kind of trigger memory. So I thought to myself, we were looking for an end table for the side of the bed. And I thought nothing could be better than putting that, you know, right next to me. So it makes me again very happy. In this corner of the bedroom, there's a wonderful little painting. And it's actually a wood nymph kind of playfully hiding in a landscape. And I love the charming nature of it. There was a gallery that was on the left bank in Paris that had the most wonderful sort of botanically inspired artwork. And every time we went to Paris, Joseph and I would make sure we stopped there and would always end up buying something. This is one of these pieces. It's a gouache from the 1940s. It almost looks like it was painted by someone for a children's book. It's just so charming. We also bought the mistletoe chandelier from that same Parisian antique dealer. So a lot of special treasures from her there. These three botanicals, I love them not only because they have a flower, but they also have a beautiful depiction of butterflies and moths. The set of three came from the old master painting sale at Sotheby's. And they were framed like this already. That's the one thing that's very nice at buying at auction. Many times the artwork came from really amazing houses, so you never have to reframe. And they kind of fit perfectly. They're very soothing. They're wonderful over a bed. So this Louis Vuitton trunk, which I think makes the perfect TV stand. I've also had this my entire life, and this has a great story. So back when I started at Sotheby's, these kind of things were very plentiful. And in fact, consignors to auction would actually send these things in just to protect the object that was inside. So believe it or not, this trunk was being discarded. Now, of course, they sell for lots of money, because they're like antique Louis Vuitton. The inside is fitted beautifully, and it's a little treasure. I've never lived without it. It's always been have a place of honor in our space. The one thing we wanted to make sure with the entire apartment was that we didn't rip out the soul of the apartment. So these are all the original closets. By the way, this building was built as residences for wealthy bachelor stockbrokers in the 1920s. So it was set up as a really nice building. But they were small. They were like one bedrooms that had like two maids rooms attached to them, because the guys weren't going to take care of themselves. So all of the woodwork and all of these kind of special details, we made sure they were going to remain. We didn't want to create sort of a modern white box. But I always loved that back then, the guys could get themselves into like a little closet like this. My God, like, you know, today, you can't even get your shampoo and conditioner into something this size. So but they're totally charming. We are now in the main bathroom. One of the best things to have in a pre war apartment in New York City is a very glamorous, beautiful marble bathroom. So there's one thing that Joseph definitely wanted to have our bathroom. This is one of the things that we really did change did not look like this when we first got the apartment. Beautiful marble everywhere, beautiful marble counter. All of the fittings are antique. They came from wonderful sort of English 1920s homes or perhaps an apartment, a beautiful old radiator that came from England, which is, I think, very special and very glamorous. Joseph loves all of the sort of functioning parts of a space to be beautiful. All the hardware is something that he loves. And I think that this bathroom truly captures that. We also have some very special kind of botanical artwork. This is by a very dear friend of ours, Nancy Lorenz. It was actually a thank you, she sent us and then we framed it because it was so beautiful. And that's our bathroom. My ideal day in New York City. I guess I'm going to describe two days. I think there are two parts to New York City. There are really two parts to my life. I think describing a downtown day and an uptown day would kind of fit the bill. Joseph and I love to walk. It is the number one most wonderful thing about New York City. And it's one thing that we actually miss living in Florida, being in a car. So the downtown day would just be going out and walking up and down every street in a neighborhood. You know, we often think we need to go to Paris or London to have that experience. You can really have it right here. And, you know, very recently, we decided let's walk around the Lower East Side. And we were blown away. There's like so many new restaurants and stores. And then suddenly there's an incredible modern building that was built by Calatrava. And you discover a great little coffee shop that you sit in. And we never tried to base it around like finding the perfect restaurant. We just walk up to a restaurant, read the menu, and think, let's try this. And that sense of discovery has been sort of amazing and makes a very perfect day. We often leave very early, come back very late, and then we're so exhausted, we just go to sleep. But the uptown day, which I'm going to actually have tomorrow with a very dear friend of mine, one of my favorite people and who was my boss at Sotheby's. So we're going to meet at the Frick for a wonderful private tour. Then we're going to have lunch at the wonderful restaurant that's called Cafe Sobarski, which is in Ronald Lauder's wonderful museum. And then we're going to head over to the Met. And just we may not get into like all the exhibitions that are crowded because it's a weekend. But even just wandering on any of the galleries, it's amazing kind of thing. Then we're going over to Sotheby's, which has moved into a wonderful new building. And we're going to look at some of the exhibitions and things that are for sale, have dinner there and their wonderful new restaurant. And that'll finish the uptown day. Describing what home means to me, that's a very big word. I hope it means the same to a lot of other people. It's sort of where your heart sings. It's kind of the place that you store all your wonderful memories. Hopefully it's the place that you live with the person you love the most. Also where your wonderful pet lives. You know, we have a wonderful dog that's part of our family. And, you know, it's where you wake up and go to sleep. And every time you look around the room, you see everything that you love. I'm very sentimental. So I want to find all those little things that remind me of my mom or my dad. And that's what I think home is. It's a very special place.