“Modern stuff I simply don’t apprehend,” fashion dressmaker Adam Lippes says over coffee in the sun-splashed living room of his Brooklyn Heights apartment. “It’s simply unpleasant.” So, defiantly, he surrounds himself with the atmospheric contrary.
A Victorian-style borne sofa centers the distance like a white-and-blue water lily, and a Russian Empire mahogany bookcase stretches across one wall and almost to the ceiling. The master bedroom’s predominant event is a custom-made cover mattress that channels the nutty Chinese Chippendale pagoda daybeds at England’s Stanway House. Gustavian chairs ring a Biedermeier pedestal eating desk. A Kentia palm—an arboreal accent cherished by some other boldface style designer, namely Christian Dior—sprouts from a ceramic cachepot in the residing room, its luxuriance, underscored using lacy wicker furniture, evoking an old fashioned Jardin d’ hiver, albeit one painted the palest color of pink.
“We selected it for this room and without a doubt loved it, and now it’s most of the people of the rental,” Lippes says of the hue, Farrow & Ball’s Setting Plaster, noting that the silk faille that upholsters the dining room become dyed to fit. “It’s crimson, but it’s no longer love. It’s pink. It’s got a whole lot of gray in it, that is satisfactory,” he adds about the paint. “And it turns purple-orange at sunset.”
Friends evaluate Lippes’s dreamy setup to living like a grandmother, and in his protection, he says, “Well, sure, I do, and what’s wrong with that? They stay properly.” Make that a granny with a twist. Last yr, the fashion designer and his associate, Alexander Farnsworth, cofounded Highminded, a purveyor of recreational marijuana products. Its first store opens this year in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, near the couple’s u. S. Vicinity.
Still, Farnsworth, Highminded’s CEO, wonders if the gentility in their home sphere needs to be quite so thorough. “Why can’t we simply positioned some big, low sofas in right here?” he as soon as requested. “It may want to happen someday, but not right now,” Lippes observes. “I like that there are a majority of these distinctive areas for human beings to congregate while we entertain. Someone’s over there chatting, and some other organization is over here; human beings are sitting within the bedroom talking.” Or they’re sprawled at the banquettes that ring a tented space that the couple calls the opium den. “Everybody hangs out here,” Lippes says, settling right into a supine posture inside the golden glow of an Orientalist lantern that he and Farnsworth found on a journey to Tangier.
The dressmaker’s determination to antique-faculty style comes naturally. His mother was an indoors decorator with a similar aesthetic point of view, and his father has lengthy accrued Biedermeier furnishings and current art. “I’m captivated with fixtures, obsessed, extra than with clothes any day of the week,” Lippes says, adding that his treasures continually become influencing his fashions. The multicolored carnations and other plant life blooming at the residing room’s 1940s Portuguese carpet “could be an outstanding print for garments.” When the clothier discovered that one of his father’s preferred sellers changed into requisitioning a truckload of antiques at public sale, he leaped on the threat to convey more of the beyond into his home blend, such as a couple of obelisk-form mahogany shelves that flank a fire in a visitor bedroom. Invaluable.Com, Lippes admits, is “my worst pal,” and the overdue French romanticist decorator Madeleine Castaing—a number of the living room’s wicker furnishings got here from her residence near Chartres—is an essential muse. “She took super grand areas and made them livable.”
Lippes and Farnsworth’s domestic can be one such setting: a top ground of a stately 1850s mansion graced with fanciful waterfront balconies that supply the building an Ottoman air. So a whole lot so that, if one is in an in particular escapist nation of mind, New York Harbor would possibly as well be the Bosporus. The spacious balconies off the dwelling room have proved to be so engaging that Farnsworth has a strict paintings-hours rule: He ventures out of the road-front guest bedroom that serves as his workplace best inside the late afternoon, admitting, “Otherwise, I’d simply fade away.”
The theatricality of these out of doors spaces is without difficulty matched by using most of the condo’s furniture. “I like matters that have something weird about them or are a bit off,” Lippes says, an announcement that takes in everything from 18th-century Italian gilt-timber girandoles with wildly twisting hands to a remarkable nineteenth-century sewing desk normal of finely curlicued wicker. Since this story became photographed, as an example, bizarre chairs determined at a public sale in Cincinnati have changed the stylish Gustavians within the dining room; now he and Farnsworth and their visitors calm down on High-sponsored seats, probably 19th-century French, that blend difficult rattan frames, Chinese panels, and burl-wooden feet that resemble clenched fists.
“Not that many people desired them,” Lippes confides with a smile that makes it clear that Cincinnati’s loss is Brooklyn Heights’ gain: Six chairs, plus a sinuous matching sofa and a desk, the price just $1, six hundred. Invaluable, here I come.
