When Wendy Moonan was growing up in Westport, Conn., during the 1960s, no one she knew hired a decorator. It was considered déclassé, Moonan says,…
When Wendy Moonan was growing up in Westport, Conn., during the 1960s, no one she knew hired a decorator. It was considered déclassé, Moonan says, to hire a professional when the general wisdom was that “people with taste should be able to furnish and design their own interiors. Period.”
How times have changed, jokes Moonan, whose book, “ New York Splendor: The City’s Most Memorable Rooms,” debuted this fall. The tome — a hefty volume with 200 glossy photos — is “a compendium of my favorite private residential rooms in New York City.” She entered countless stunning homes while holding a variety of positions in the design world: At Home editor at Town & Country; writer for House & Garden and Architectural Digest.
“My main criterion was that each project have the ‘wow’ factor — rooms that elicited, from me, gasps of pleasure and admiration,” Moonan says. Here, some highlights.
RHAPSODY IN BLUE
In a three-story apartment in a Fifth Avenue townhouse, designer Alberto Pinto kept 1885-installed “lacy ornamental plasterwork on the salon ceiling” intact through a major renovation.
Pinto took the owners, a couple, to Paris. They shopped for antiques and paintings by Old Masters, which he used in the light blue living room.
There’s a dose of whimsy here, too: Note the golden chair with armrests shaped like seahorses.
SEEING GREEN
The book’s cover is another special space: Joanna de Palma helped a couple furnish an apartment in a late 1800s building on Central Park West with period-appropriate furniture, lighting and art, sourcing green, blue and gold decor off of a teal floral rug circa 1900.
