House & Garden
|
The Art of Arrangement Nina Griscom's arrangement of architectural shapes - antique staircase models, a pair of mounted sawfish bills (available through her store) bring a sculptural quality to her living room, this page. The sea grass carpet is from ABC Carpet & Home. Cushions are in Leopard Velvet, from Brunschwig & Fils. In the master bedroom, opposite page, French sconces, ca. 1920, and an antique mirror add geometric reflective surfaces.
In her Manhattan Town House, Nina Griscom, A Muse For The Late Designer Bill Blass, Shows Her Keen Eye For Mixing Objects of Every Period. Animal prints, including an antique zebra rug and leopard-print velvet chair seats, are vivid touches in the serene house Four years ago, after a very public divorce, Nina Griscom, long a resident of sprawling apartments, moved into a five-story town house on Manhattan's East Side. A neglected pile with good bones, it was within walking distance of her daughter's father and school, her mother's home, and her heralded home furnishings shop on Lexington Avenue. The move into a century-old vertical space with six working fireplaces turned out to be just the catharsis Griscom needed. Famed as a muse for designer Bill Blass, who died in 2002, Griscom renovated her new digs using everything she had learned from her "mister" : the importance of scale and juxtaposition, how to walk into an antiquaire's, how questions are asked, how deals are made, and the need for a sense of humor. Griscom began at the front door, stripping thick layers of paint. It now gleams a black-lacquered welcome from each inch of its gorgeous moldings. Corroded ironwork underwent the same spiffy uplift. Inside, ceilings, woodwork, and a staircase emerged as wonderfil architectural details after years as dingy dust catchers. She put her office, overseen by assistant Zoe Markwalter, on the ground floor, which also houses the kitchen and the high-ceilinged dining room, where Griscom's innate style dazzles against the neutral backgrounds she prefers. Faced with a dining space smaller than those in modern homes, but determined to use her furniture, she installed a curcular mahogany dining table and chairs that seat 12, all from her good friend Robert Lighton's British Khaki collection. An antique architectural model, a Christmas present from Blass, sits on a mid-nineteenth-century Irish console she bought from Niall Smith, "one of the great eyes in this town." A 1930s Venetian-style French mirror hangs between two oil renderings on canvas of classical urns; she bought the paintings at the Paris flea market several years ago. On a recent visit, she found more; realizing "this was a cottage industry," she plans to tap it for her store.
In the upstairs library, Griscom often sets a table for four, doing the cooking herself for evenings "geared to good company and intimacy." Flanking the fireplace is a pair of large drawings of ships that Blass found at the London galleries of Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox. "They completely inform my library." Griscom says. "It is important for me to look at them every day, not only for their beauty but for their being from somebody I loved so much." In the library, top, Griscom, wearing Prada and a necklace and cuffs by Faraone Mennella, NYC, sits on an English mahogany bench. The room has a Designway sofa and slipper chair, left, in Hinson & Company's Como Velvet in Mushroom. In the dining room, opposite page, a French lantern and a custom shagreen screen by Garrison Rousseau are coppery counterpoints to the Durbar banquet table and Turnbull side chairs, available through Robert Lighton New York. The entry hall's white walls are an ideal backdrop for shapely wooden pieces, opposite page, such as an Empire console, ca.1870, and English hall chairs from Cove Landing, NYC. The library, this page, reveals Griscom's gift for playing with scale: a diminutive table set with tiny busts sits between French Empire chairs, and a small model of Rome's Arch of Constantine sits below a large drawing of a ship, a gift from Bill Blass. Biltmore wallpaper by Nina Campbell, through Osborne & Little.
A counterpoint of bold and delicate patterns animates the cool atmosphere of the master bedroom and dressing room. Her collection of old master drawings glows in the living room, a calm riot of cream and gray. Holding pride of place in a handsome antique tortoiseshell frame is another tie to Blass, a portrait of a rabbit attributed to the school of Hoffman after Durer. "I don't care if Bill's nephew did it; this was our rabbit," she says. "If you asked me what thing I loved the most, this would be it." Griscom's eye for juxtaposing furnishings and accessories is clear: the art is exquisite, but there's sea grass, cheaper and more durable than sisal, on the floor. "It's not all about flxing your muscle on everything." she says. "How can you tell a person who eats caviar that they can't have minestrone?" Antiques countering reproductions, cat-print pillows, shells, and architectural models all speak of a woman who loves beautiful things, no matter their origin. "It's the hunt, the chase, the education," Griscom says. "Beauty comes to us in all forms and prices, and I'm equally respectful of them all." That sensibility continues outside, where she whitewashed the second floor terrace. Once an off-putting red-brick area, it is now what Griscom calls "an aspect of the house that I absolutely adore." She can look down on it from her badroom, a serene space composed around familiar things: an upholstered bed she has had since her first apartment and a tortoiseshell and ivory inkwell with a Buddha sitting under a tiny lamp, from her Memphis grandmother, Louise Kent. Her dressing room, an ode to Blass, contains masses of carefully stored dresses he made for her and dozens of his drawings on walls covered in paisley Rose Tarlow paper that reminds Griscom of her beloved India. She made the space intimate, Eastern, and exotic, and as is true in other rooms, she could "redo it in a nano," her enthusiasm undiminished by memories of single-handedly dragging sofas up the stairs at 3 A.M. Yet she won't. Now is the time for her business. "I'm not a decorator; I own stores," she says. "I hope to go further, to be an owner of a company that provides and manufactures wonderful design elements. I can pick good things, but I need a good team, good advice, good gurus, and luck." Elizabeth Blish Hughes is a writer based in New York and San Francisco.
|
|
Signature Style Whether She is at Home or on > The Perfect Brew < Paper Chase > Making Scents V Dream Reads ^ Shirt Tales
The town, For Nina Griscom, Good Design is and always has been a way of life
V Shop Talk ^ Sweet Tooth ^ Hoop Stars < Four-Legged Friends > Skin Savers > View Scan of Article in Original Layout [Requires Acrobat] |
