Hi, AD. Welcome to my New York City home.
Come on in.
Watch your step.
[upbeat music]
We were so lucky to find this apartment.
I think this is one of the most
beautiful apartments in New York.
The building was built in the ’20s
and was originally a hotel.
We are on the roof of this building.
We actually have several terraces,
and we share a terrace with our very close friends,
which is kind of amazing.
If you look out here,
you see we have like a little herb garden
that we planted for our use
and for our neighbor’s use as well.
I love New York.
This is the first time in my life that I’ve lived up high.
I lived in a townhouse for almost 25 years, I guess.
And so I was really used to sort of street-level living,
and this is completely different.
You can see the city all around you. There’s so much life.
You see people.
There’s a guy on his balcony over there, right there.
It’s a wonderful way to experience the life of the city.
I just love it here.
[upbeat music]
These chairs I bought in Paris in 1995.
I love them. They’ve been in every house that I’ve ever had.
I don’t think I’ll ever be able to part with them.
Person who sold them to me in Paris
said they might be Frank.
I doubt it.
If they were Frank,
I don’t think I could have afforded them.
Okay, this I’m really proud of because this is Ikea.
I needed a piece where I could have my dishes
because we don’t have a lot of storage in here.
I was thinking about having something built and I found this
and then I put it together
and I was like, Oh my gosh, the color is perfect.
I like the industrial quality it has.
And it ended up kind of going with everything.
This piece is so sweet and it was designed to hold eggs.
I guess you’re gonna have a lot of eggs on your countertop
or you could put like deviled eggs in it.
It’s by the ceramic artist called Four.
This little bird is a bird that was given to me by my mother
because she knows that I love birds.
Oliver Freundlich and I, who’s my architect,
were really, really careful
about the details of this apartment because it’s small.
I mean, not terribly small,
but it’s compact enough
that the details really, really matter.
And so that idea
of having just like a little bit of shine everywhere,
like in the light switches and with the faucets
and the cabinet handles
was really something that we were trying to achieve.
You have to be really careful about this door
because there’s a handle only on the inside.
So if you go like this and you go like this,
you could lock somebody out,
which is what I did to my husband once
when he was outside in the terrace working
and I went to work.
Luckily, he had his phone with him
so I could come back upstairs and let him in.
[upbeat music]
So this is actually the entry to the apartment.
There’s a little door here that goes to the hallway.
I have a mirror that I actually just put up here,
a really beautiful ceramic piece
by an artist named Isabel Rower.
It’s almost my height if I stand on my toes.
I like craft a lot.
I don’t like things to be overproduced.
I like patina, I like texture, I like ceramics.
This is a piece that I found in a vintage store
on West 13th Street, early 2000s.
It’s been in every entryway
of every house I’ve had since then.
I just love it. It’s like a piece of sculpture.
And this is a bowl that was given to me by a makeup artist
that I work with when we were doing Hannibal,
was a woodworker in Asheville where we were shooting,
and she knew that I wouldn’t like the piece
if it was finished,
so she asked for it to be unfinished,
and it looks really great.
This is a Pierre Chapo table
that I looked for for a long time
and was lucky enough to find.
It’s sort of our entry tables.
We put things down on it all the time.
I work here during the day.
It’s a joy to be in this room with a terrace right there
working on this beautiful table.
It makes me really happy.
People always ask about the bookcases.
These were the previous owner’s.
They’re so cool and I really like the color.
So when I was trying to pick the color for the apartment,
I had this to use as a sample.
I used the concrete tiles from the kitchen
and the stone that I used for the mantelpiece.
So I had those as a sample with this,
and I was able to find a paint
that kind of went with all three,
and it’s Seapearl by Benjamin Moore.
So the books, basically,
I have all of my design books over there.
These are kind of my art books.
This is an artist who I admire very much, Sheila Hicks,
and she’s actually represented
by a gallery that’s very, very close to here.
And I saw her once in the street outside the gallery
and I was too shy to go over and say hello,
but I did stare at her for a while.
These pieces are by my friend Massimiliano Locatelli,
who’s an Italian architect.
He’s a friend of mine
and he’s gifted me both of these pieces.
This one’s cool because look,
turns into a chair
or you can use it as a bench.
Anyway, he’s really, really talented.
He lives in Milan, and I see him whenever I go there.
And I love this little silver chair.
[mellow music]
This is our living room, and I think it’s pretty much a fact
that if there’s not a TV in a living room, you won’t use it.
And I don’t like to sit
and, like, have a TV off to the side.
So we put a projector in the room
and kept the other wall blank.
So it’s absolutely fantastic.
I don’t mind technical equipment.
I’d rather see a good-looking piece of equipment
than see something kind of in a case.
And we sit here and we watch basketball and we watch movies.
We’re lucky enough to have an actual working fireplace.
That’s very, very unusual in New York City.
Okay, and so this is something,
I was really inspired when I went to a sculptor’s house once
and he had all of these tiny little pieces
that he made everywhere.
So that’s what I did.
This is Rogan Gregory, whose work I like quite a bit.
This is Nancy Pearce.
She makes these objects, these sort of everyday objects.
This is a pair of AirPods.
Here’s a cassette tape that she makes.
Then she saw some ceramic pieces that I made
and she was like, You know what?
Why don’t we make them in bronze?
These are all pieces that I made in ceramic
and that she cast in bronze.
This is a crystal ball that my husband gave me once.
My brother-in-law, an architect, Oliver Freundlich,
gave me these pieces.
I think they’re pretty cool.
I think Noguchi is such an important American artist.
You know, you can actually have
a piece of light sculpture in your house,
so I just think he’s incredible.
This is Nakashima, a Japanese American designer
who worked in Pennsylvania.
This is the first
important piece of furniture I ever bought.
This is Gaetano Pesce.
So, Matthieu Blazy, he had a show where he had Pesce
make and supply all of the chairs for the audience.
So everybody sat in these kind of amazing chairs.
And you just have to be careful to keep it out of the sun
because evidently it can melt, but it hasn’t melted yet.
So I want to tell you the story about my wax baby,
which I love so much.
I was doing a photo shoot with my friend Helena Christensen
and I was working with a woman named Lisbeth McCoy,
and I saw this baby
and I said, Oh my God, that’s so beautiful.
Who made that baby?
And Lisbeth said, I did.
So it’s really an amazing piece to have.
And I like this too
because it’s with our Louise Bourgeois piece right here
and there’s something about these pieces
that are both so feminine.
I think they’re kind of like great
in conversation with each other.
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So here I’m polishing my light switches.
So these are Forbes & Lomax, and I really love them.
They feel so good in your hand.
I love the color of the polished nickel.
I have to have a bathtub.
I have to have a bathtub in my house.
I have to have a bathtub in a hotel.
It’s like something that is essential to my life.
And this has the cutest little bathtub.
It’s actually the perfect size for me
because I don’t like a bathtub that’s too big
because then the water gets too cold too fast.
I was fortunate that it was here,
so we were able to use the original bathtub.
The previous owner had excellent taste.
These were all her marble tiles.
And Oliver, very painstakingly,
found tiles that would match them.
It’s sort of interesting, but it really works
to have all of these different patterns.
This is a signature of Oliver’s. I love this.
A marine lip.
This is, you know, so if you spill,
say you’re drinking your water and you go like this,
it’s not gonna go off the edge.
It’s gonna collect on the marine lip, which I love.
And everybody always comments on that
when they see this bathroom.
These are Eileen Gray light fixtures. I just love them.
Like I said, I like things that are a little bit industrial
or a little bit hard.
One of the things that’s great
about this bathroom in particular
is because the marble is so bright
and these lights are so good,
you tend to look really good in this bathroom.
Sometimes you might look better in this bathroom
than you do in real life.
So I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
[mellow music]
I do a lot of yoga,
so I like to keep the floor bare up here.
I sort of struggle with whether or not I put a rug down,
but I like it like this.
We put in all of these closets, so this is all my stuff.
Mine are packed, which is why I’m not gonna open it up.
This I love.
This is a photograph that my husband took
with his telescope and his iPhone.
It’s a picture of the moon.
My little Nanna Ditzel stool, Danish female designer.
I love this little stool.
These are vintage angled lamps that I had
and they were wall-mounted.
So only recently was I able to find these bases
and then I brought them to my lamp guy and he attached them.
So I’m very happy about that.
This is really funny.
I’m about to do this movie based on this book.
Do you guys know this book? Okay.
So this is a book that came out in the ’70s
and a lot of people don’t, like, know it,
but it’s a book that’s basically like a version
of the Kama Sutra
that was written by, like, an English scientist.
So I’m about to make a movie based on that book.
That’s why it’s there.
[upbeat music]
Bye, AD. Thanks for coming.