{"id":159068,"date":"2026-03-10T12:24:43","date_gmt":"2026-03-10T12:24:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/159068\/"},"modified":"2026-03-10T12:24:43","modified_gmt":"2026-03-10T12:24:43","slug":"athena-calderone-takes-manhattan-architectural-digest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/159068\/","title":{"rendered":"Athena Calderone Takes Manhattan | Architectural Digest"},"content":{"rendered":"

On seeing this apartment for the first time, Athena told Victor, \u201cIt felt like Gotham City, not Manhattan.\u201d They made an offer later that day. Their new place, a full floor in an august Tribeca building dating to the early 1900s, was originally the executive suite of the Borden condensed milk company, its prestige distilled in herringbone floors, 13-foot ceilings, and oak-paneled walls the color of chocolate syrup. After a residential conversion in the 1980s, it was acquired by the charismatic French architect Thierry Despont<\/a>, whose historically agile public projects\u2014freshening up the Statue of Liberty, renovating the Ritz Paris\u2014bookended the au courant interiors he designed for Kelly and Calvin Klein, Oscar de la Renta, Bill Gates, and others. His apartment was a sepia-toned folly, with kitchen stools from a 1930s Italian motor yacht and a gridded-brass backsplash styled after the grill of a vintage Bugatti roadster.<\/p>\n

Absent Despont\u2019s glamorous accoutrements, though, the Borden corporate blueprint resurfaced like a milk mustache. The hallways had bowling lane proportions, the bathrooms were tiny. Calderone debated bleaching the dark woodwork that had incensed her EyeSwoon posse from the get-go (\u201cWhy does it feel a bit like Joan Crawford\u2019s home circa the \u201930s in Mommie Dearest?\u201d one commenter posted), but after a trip to Vienna and Adolf Loos\u2019s faultlessly pint-size American Bar there, she decided to embrace the darkness and stop worrying about tiny rooms. \u201cI ended up finding the Brownstone Boys<\/a> on Instagram, who refinished the woodwork beautifully at not that high a price,\u201d she says. \u201cWhere there\u2019s a will, there\u2019s a way.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On seeing this apartment for the first time, Athena told Victor, \u201cIt felt like Gotham City, not Manhattan.\u201d…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":159069,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[2408,75,84,83,9,24,63],"class_list":["post-159068","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-manhattan","tag-celebrity","tag-manhattan","tag-manhattan-headlines","tag-manhattan-news","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159068","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=159068"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159068\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/159069"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=159068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=159068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=159068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}