Temple & Webster Blog

Our fearless Editorial Director takes a bite of the Big Apple, and shares a few of her New York moments.

Confession time. I would like to start this post by coming clean. I am meant to be a worldly, design-savvy person who has a deep understanding of global style capitals. While I can lay claim to London, Paris, Madrid, Tokyo and in the US, Los Angeles and Miami, I have never, ever been to New York.

People would raise an eyebrow when I told them, so sometimes I would just nod when they talked about Brooklyn or the building at 23^rd West Street and 9^th (because that is how people do NY talk – in street junctions). So now I feel I am truly a (travel) adult – for I have been to the Big Apple. I have mastered the credit card yellow cab payment with 20% tip, I have had breakfast at La Buvette, shopped in John Derian and lunched at abc home; I have trodden the Guggenheim’s spiral gallery and seen the Statue of Liberty. Here is a pictorial snapshot of what I saw and what I loved. It may have been a long time coming but boy, did it deliver.

There is something about this combination of images that, to me, sums up the city. On one hand you have cutting-edge modernism in the shape of The New Museum in The Bowery – seven rectangular boxes in a shimmering skin of anodized aluminium, towering approximately 54 metres above street level.  Set in between solid nineteenth century warehouses, Tokyo-based architects SANAA created a context for contemporary art exhibitions adding a new icon to the urban landscape. At street level, the vibrancy of the city, and its cultural mix, is everywhere. Around the corner on Prince Street, Café Habana has a cult following with its renowned Mexican-style corn and Cuban sandwich winning awards and attracting locals.

I have been a long-time admirer of the John Derian aesthetic. My friend, photographer Martyn Thompson, had captured the charm of his faded eclecticism in his book, Interiors, and so it was definitely on the ‘to do’ list. While I didn’t buy up big I did get two gifts for friends – a beautiful calico container with colourful embroidered feathers and an elegant grey waffle hand towel – which both came beautifully wrapped. It is one of those shops that requires serious concentration, as there is just so much to look at, handle, fall in love with and buy. Along the street at 6 East Second Street was this wonderful raven – fittingly it could have been on a John Derian plate.

I couldn’t resist another John Derian image, as this fairly small shop manages to pack in so much interest in terms of cluttered, detailed display often contrasting with a simple impactful treatment.  Here a cushion-covered linen sofa sits in front of a Di Chirico-style artwork with a deep, dramatic perspective. Another shop with a great range of designer product is The Future Perfect. Originally Brooklyn based, the move uptown (and now a new San Francisco store) shows it is a business on the move. Stocking a range of desirable yet easy to live with brands such as Studioilse, Russell Pinch, Donna Wilson and Piet Van Eek’s Scrapwood Bucket Seat (shown here) it is well worth the visit.

Sometime a view says it all. Taken from a roof terrace at the Staten Island Ferry looking back at Tribeca, this vista is quintessentially New York – a seemingly unregulated mix of eras, building styles and architectural types. All are unapologetically monolithic and all combine to give the city its density, its character and its beauty. One of the materials that is distinctive in old NY is decorative tin panelling, used here in the interior of Le Labo, a perfumer that custom creates scents according to your personal preferences. Made to order from essential oil concentrates, your choices are blended for you and the bottle carries your name and date of fabrication. Now that makes you feel really special.

All Good Things delivers on its promise. This Tribeca store houses eight vendors of compatible ethics and quality who combine to create foodie/flower/coffee heaven. Choose a gourmet cheese from Cavaniolas, pick up a Blue Bottle Coffee, a Blue Marble ice cream, bread from Orwasher’s Bakery, an organic chicken from Dickson’s Farmstead Meats and a bunch of flowers from Pollux. It is the ultimate Saturday morning destination for every treat you want to give your weekend self.  Did I mention Nunu chocolates? Because I should have. Visiting Anthropologie in Chelsea Markets is an interesting exercise in how commerce and creativity can work together to create an exciting and serendipitous shopping experience. A beaded make-up bag – tick – a cluster of coloured ceramic vases – tick – an artist painted timber chair – tick.  If I had a bigger suitcase I would have bought more but settled for the aforesaid make-up bag which I thought had overtones of Marni and my daughter thought was plain ugly. PS: Chelsea Market also has Ruthy’s, a cake shop of awesome skill level (particularly if you are under 12 years old). Perfect replicas of Big Bird from Sesame Street sat beside Barbie in a ball gown and an impressive SpongeBob SquarePants.

Frank Gehry is one of the world’s most challenging and controversial st-architects but this building, for Barry Diller’s IAC empire, is controversial for not pushing the architectural envelope quite far enough.  But I have to stay whipping along the West Side Highway day and night in yellow cabs the building, with its folds, shadows and smudged-effect windows looked evocative and beautiful from dawn to dusk.  Another winner from Anthropologie is this Fes Patel chair – a simple modernist shape takes on a new identity with faded kilim upholstery.

One of the undeniable shopping highlights was the trip to abc carpet and home. It is a store that takes a stand and at the time of our visit the windows were focusing on the issue of fracking, yes fracking, in a campaign spearheaded by Yoko Ono. Fracking aside, it is a wonderful emporium of all things design-worthy from jewellery to furniture  and so much creative effort goes into the displays – like this laboratory-style set up in the vintage  section. The store requires serious amounts of time to do it justice. Hence we went twice and all our gifts came from there, my daughter spent her holiday money there and we even had lunch at the abc kitchen. Apparently an evening booking is hard to come by so we grabbed the opportunity at lunchtime. She had a small-scale pizza and I had a large-scale salad. We had both just had our nails done and she couldn’t resist a photo with the delicate side-plate on our table.

Brunch is big in NY and we made the most of this in-betweeny meal. This orange waffle was served at Café Gitane, a French Moroccan hangout in Nolita’s Mott Street. The coffee was so good we had seconds and that is not something you do everywhere in NY. Other top breakfast spots are La Buvette (we came pretty much off the plane from LA, were there before it opened, and still joined a queue), where the scrambled eggs are that deep rich yellow that you just know indicates a happy hen. Paris in New York – what a great cultural combo. We had a breakfast meeting with the editorial side of US online retailer One Kings Lane and swapped stories at Locanda Verde, in the Greenwich Hotel. I ordered a dish recommended to me – sheep’s milk ricotta with truffle honey and burnt orange toast. I didn’t need to be told twice. This impressive sculpture is only part of a massive structure called ‘Red, Yellow and Blue’ by artist Orly Genger. 1.4 million feet of nautical rope wends its way around Madison Square Park creating a huge organic installation.

Sometimes it is good to have a bit of home in a foreign city. We stayed with stylist Glen Proebstel for a few nights and he kindly gave up his bed for my daughter and I. We slept in linen sheets from Melbourne’s Bedouin Societe, under a knitted linen throw from our own Jacqui Fink and read by a Noguchi light given to Glen by a good Aussie friend. I can lay no claim to the splattered painter’s chair. I had to pay a visit to the Elizabeth Street store of Dinosaur Designs. It didn’t disappoint with the usual beautiful colour combinations, organic shapes and subtle textures they have made their signature.

When it comes to architectural icons they simply don’t get any better than this. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim is an exercise in dynamism and his continuous spiral design broke all design boundaries when it opened in 1959. It was his last major building and he died six months before it opened. The Flatiron building, also in Manhattan, was built in 1902 and was based on a triangular ground-plan, hence its defining shape and subsequent nickname – based on an old-fashioned clothes iron. Triangles and circles – greatness, it would seem, is all about geometry.

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Posted in   T&W VisitsTags  ABC Carpet & Home • Glen Proebstel • John Derian • Karen McCartney • New York10 comments