Interior Design

What an amazing apartment. I don’t know if I could really live in it, but it sure as hell is glamorous. I wonder if it feels claustrophobic?

The designer says: “The client was Cindy Gallop, international woman of mystery, who didn’t exactly have much time, as the chairwoman of advertising giant BBH, to lay out her new apartment in the converted locker rooms of the first YMCA in the U.S. But she did have time to inspire us… her brief was simple: “at night, I want to feel like I’m in a Shanghai nightclub…” and so our proposal was equally simple: “What if you lived inside a black-lacquered Chinese box?” To our amazement, she was game so we knew our next idea would pass as well, no walls whatsoever, just a network of curtains which could be used to make rooms on-the-fly. Of course, there was the matter of the 300 pairs of heels that Ms. Gallop cherishes as art and so they were treated as such, displayed in the own light boxes, all along the width of the apartment. This project was conceptual in nature at first but yielded results beyond our wildest dreams in terms of comfort of living and luxury.”

Check out more photos and a video here.

I like big open spaces. I’d gladly live in a warehouse, especially if it looked like this…

If I had a home, I’d fill it with Anthropologie…

Brilliant vanity cases for your wall, made from vintage suitcases! Adorable, I want one… if only I had a wall to put it on. Also check out the liquor cabinet! Get them here.

I am at this moment in Paris – the city you just can’t stop taking photos of – and there will be many a photo to come on this blog, but in the meantime, here’s a taste with this little compilation of the many textures to be savored at the Chateau de Versailles. What a wonderful day we had! Oh the opulence, oh the grandeur, more photos to come!

This is designer Anna Sui’s apartment in Manhattan! Look at that dressing room! Pick up the September ‘09 Elle Decor for all the photos of this glamorous home:

Anna Sui—the woman as well as the fashion label she launched in 1981—broadcasts an anarchic edge, flaunting clothing with fantastic patterns, colorful layers, and retro references from Age of Aquarius rock stars to Belle Époque courtesans. Often all in the same outfit, mind you. Sui’s new Manhattan abode, a top-floor space in the same 19th-century Greenwich Village building as the one-bedroom apartment she’s lived in since 2000, is just as funky. It’s an inspired mingling of extravagant furniture, chinoiserie wallpaper, and vintage doodads whose sum-total flamboyance recalls the do-it-yourself glamour of the 1970s, when Sui first came to Manhattan from her native Detroit.

The designer acquired the annex a little more than a year ago, realizing it would be a perfect spot for spreading out to work on book projects. (A salute to her career will be published next year by Chronicle Books, written with Andrew Bolton, a close friend and a curator of the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.) As Sui says, “With two apartments, I can have dinner downstairs and drinks and dessert upstairs.”

Desire to Inspire, one of my favorite interior design blogs just posted this absolutely gorgeous Australian home. The stark palette makes it a little colder than I would normally prefer, but it does make it terribly glamorous. Black laquered wood, leather sofas, crystal and glass, floral wallpapers and subdued rugs, and of course the black and white checkerboard tiles. Classic!

Via Desire to Inspire: “Australian interior designer Greg Natale has established himself as the leading exponent in this country of what one could call Hollywood Regency but with an Australian twist. What results, especially in this recent residential project, is the elevation of everyday living to something glamorous, something just a little more special, something with just a touch of the unexpected.”

I like the eclectic, retro industrial look of the Ace Hotels.

Check out the Selima Optique boutique in Soho. I love the old fashioned glass cases crowded with goods, the red walls, the cream leather sofa, the gilt frames. And look closely, they’ve put eyeglasses onto all the faces in the paintings!