Elle Decor
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If Ernest Hemingway were still around, Nina Griscom would likely inspire more than a few short stories. With her tawny good looks, bon vivant attitude, and leonine purr, all this former model and current tastemaker needs to be one of Papa's heroines is a shotgun in the crook of her arm and a safari jacket. Griscom's larger-than-life allure and refined beauty made her one of the fashion designer Bill Blass's main muses, and the two became fast friends. While he was drawn to her no-nosense demeanor and salty humor, she appreciated his manly elegance. She also admired his impeccable decorating style, with his passion for Roman antiquities and uncluttered rooms dressed in brown and white. "Bill was a big mentor," says Griscom, now the proprietor of an eponymous Upper East Side home-furnishings shop known for chic accessories of leather, horn, shell, and coral and charming telephone tables covered in everything from shagreen to African-bullfrog skin. "But when it came to doing a house for myself, I had to be me rather than do Bill Blass on a budget. He could afford those ancient statues; I can't. And I'm not into neoclassicism."
That's not to say the legendary couturier's influence is entirely absent from the country house where she, he husband, real-estate broker Leonel Piraino, and her 16-year-old daughter, Lily Baker, spend weekends. Located on 15 wooded acres in Millbrook, New York - a horsey village about a two hour drive from the newlyweds' townhouse in Manhattan - the home possesses an unmistakably Blassian swagger and restraint, its grandly proportioned rooms outfitted with neautral colors and not too much furniture. However, as a connoisseur of top-flight Regency treasures, Blass might have taken issue with Griscom's armchair of artificial moose antlers or the humble folding park chairs gathered beneath a bodaciously bristly twig chandelier that seems to be one part Adirondack lodge and two parts Tim Burton. "I am a grazer with great purpose," Griscom answers when asked to define her freewheeling but low-key style. A devotee of rough-and-tumble flea markets and earthy accoutrements often gathered on the fly - she brakes for sculptural examples of fungi growing on tree trunks, which her husband then gingerly removes - she is creatively cost-conscious too. When the couple's living room seemed to cry out for a large and impressive work of art, Griscom had a photo lab snap a picture of a Flemish Baroque drawing she owns (a 1670 study of a gnarled tree by artist Jan Siberechts) and blow it up to poster size. It now hangs above a rustic French console Griscom's mother gave her when she was 19, not far from ceiling-high stalks of yucca propped into a corner like giant pickup sticks. "I'm more into shape, form, and texture than I am about what the item is worth or where it came from," she says. "I'm not a provenance snob. Beauty is beauty, and ugly things can be beautiful too." Ditto uncomfortable objects. In the spacious living room, one of the most striking pieces of furniture is also utterly unforgiving - a circa 1950 chaise longue whose pitch is as cruel as its wood slats are punishing. "I wouldn't let my worst enemy sit on that," Griscom says of the well-weathered seat, laughing. "But it looks good." Especially when placed next to a round mahogany pedestal table made by her friend Robert Lighton.
Combinations like that take practice, because what's appealingly eclectic when handled by some people can be just plain dissonant when arranged by less skillful types. But it is the uncomplicated character of Griscom's belongings - worn woods, plain metals, ebony-dark finishes, blanched fabrics - that keeps the visual flow unruffled and the juxtapositions potent yet palatable. Most of the house's walls are painted a silvery gray that recalls the stony palettes of one of her idols, Belgian dealer-designer Axel Vervoordt. When it came time to decorate a library for Argentina-born husband, however, Griscom had the walls inventively clad in a textured covering made of dried tobacco leaves applied by hand to wood panels. The effect is somewhere between tortoiseshell lacquer and distressed leather. The roughness of the wall treatment is the perfect foil for sophisticated furnishings such as a parchment-and-bronze desk by Garrison Rousseau and an 1860s low table that belonged to Griscom's maternal grandmother. "You can't chuck out all the brown furniture." she explains with a shrug, referring to traditional antiques. Though the interiors of the Griscom-Piraino house appear peaceful, don't let the serenity fool you. Furniture is constantly shifted, and tablescapes get rearranged regularly. The iron etageres in the living room serve as cabinets of curiosities and are loaded, unloaded, and reloaded with all manner of engaging acquisitions: fossils, baskets, a fragment of a marble statue, bits of Piraino-harvested fungi. "This place is a journey, not a project," Griscom says. "It's never going to be finished. And I like that."
Clockwise from far left: A pair of 19th-century English garden urns in the dining room; the chandelier is from Hudson Home, the chairs were found at a French flea market, and the seagrass rug is from ABC Carpet & Home. In the living room, an enlargement of A Study of an Old Gnarled Tree by Jan Siberechts hangs above an antique console, and yucca stalks and clustered in the corner. The dining room table is set with pewter flatware by Match and antique plates; the hexagonal glasses and silver-and-ram's-horn candleholders are from Nina Griscom. See Resources. > View Scan of Article in Original Layout [Requires Acrobat]
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