Friederike Kemp Biggs
A new fanlight window, set between bookcases that Friederike designed, illuminates a corner of her office. The curtains are lighter copies of Victorian lifted swags. On the sofa, the throw from the 1800s was bought in St Paul de Vence, and the cushions on either side are made from the sleeves of an ancient kimono. The needlepoint carpet is contemporary.
Nothing prepares you for walking into Friederike Kemp Biggs’s penthouse apartment atop a Rosario Candela building on the Upper East Side. (The buildings this Sicilian-American architect designed in the 1920s are among the most coveted in Manhattan.) She is a decorator and designer with electric energy and a gift for making those around her feel special, and she lives in a delectable series of rooms all of her own devising and crammed with pretty things.
So where to start . . . think of the condition of amor vacui, the love of empty space, the white box, detachment, minimalism, the lack of the impress of human personality. Then think the reverse. Luxury and romance. Expressiveness. Warmth and sensuousness – curves, fringes, furbelows, fabulous passementerie, loops, papier mâché, tole, painted panelling, painted wallcoverings. Think French Empire mixed with English country with New York panache, all done with a twist of exuberance, but most of all think blue and white – and now you’re in Friederike’s apartment, in an unrestrained but impeccable melange. The eye becomes inebriated as one totters from room to room, from congenial library to seductive drawing room to a kitchen that is unlike any other – black yet gleaming, highlighted by part of her collection of blue and white porcelain and ceramics – Delft, Spode, nineteenth-century Chinese export vases, as well as anything that takes her fancy. And Friederike is fancy.
She was born in Germany but has been an East Sider for many years – well before she moved here with her husband, Jeremy Biggs, an Anglophile and an investment manager. In 1958 they decided that they did not want to go to the country every weekend and thought a penthouse with a garden and a terrace would be a good answer. And this is the very thing plus a panoramic view. (Not that it precluded the country – there is also a fantastic house on Martha’s Vineyard.)
Perhaps the dynamic that precipitously drives her – and she is a whirlwind of energy – to create such a gemütlich and soothing apartment is the fact that her parents were always on the move. “That’s what made me want to create interiors that might last.”
Although they loved the new apartment, major reconstruction lay ahead and since the building board regulations only allowed heavy construction from May to September (an atavistic rule dating from the epoch when every Upper East Sider worth the name departed New York for the summer months), it took more than two summer work sessions to do everything. “And we did do everything,” Friederike says. “It was a total gut job. George Sweeney was our architect. We opened rooms and closed passages, added a powder room, bought an extra bit of terrace to make a larder.”
The work went on. And on. “We raised the roof of the kitchen and knocked out the little elevator foyer so that you enter the apartment the minute you are off the lift and see the French doors to the terrace straight ahead – and the Empire State Building! We knocked the staff room and bathroom together and raised the ceilings to make my office.” There was just one small high window in there so they had it reconfigured to make the handsome window with its clever mirrored reveals and big fanlight. Now the light streams in and she looks out on the wraparound terrace. It’s quite unlike any other office I’ve ever seen – and certainly one of the prettiest − but she carries on her interior design business efficiently from within its unofficial charm.
Friederike had no knowledge of interior decorating − or indeed of business − when she started, but she had and has a natural talent for making a room look lovely, and she had learned how to sew from her mother. “When we were living in Formosa my parents took a weekend trip to Hong Kong, leaving me with the household help. I had a dress that I’d heard my mother say was too small for me, so I took it apart and made myself a pair of pedal pushers, which were most popular at the time. The zipper was a problem as I didn’t have one – so I used snaps! When my mother saw what I had done she began to buy me patterns and fabrics and sewing became a part of my life. I never trained. It was totally my eye and the fact that I was actually able to sew.”
And if she didn’t sew everything herself she knew the techniques and how to get the best people and the best results. The elaborate curtains in her apartment, some of which look like something designed by Thomas Hope in the Regency period, others like Victorian lifted swags, were made by her upholsterer, an old European craftsman. “His name was Ernest and sadly he is no longer with us and I miss him.”
Friederike uses blue and white in china and fabrics and objects as a highlighting motif in rooms where there is already plenty of pattern on pattern, and the end result is endearingly pretty. Her motto could be if there is an empty space – fill it. Yet it’s not cluttered. Everything is spic and span, pristine in its detail, in its carpentry and coverings, in all its arrangements. She has an eye for proper spacing, the key to this kind of decoration. “I never buy anything unless I know I have a place for the object,” she says and the mind reels at the inventory she must carry in her mind. “It is not easy to stop collecting or finishing a tabletop when one sees that perfect piece!”
In the dining room, the chinoiserie wallpaper by Gracie is echoed by the Lee Jofa fabric covering the wing chairs. The dining chairs are English and Friederike calls the mahogany table “Chipplewhite.”
The view through from the entrance hall to the large sitting room with its Regency chairs and an antique Japanese screen on the left-hand wall. The sofa in the hall on the right is known as a courting bench: it has a peephole to catch anyone daring to flirt. The hanging light came from Vaughan’s in London.
Her dining room could be in a French chateau, but one owned by an unusually imaginative chatelaine. “The chandelier was bought in New York and I already had the dining room table and chairs before I married Jeremy – they have moved with me many times.” (The chairs are English.) She’s not above poking fun at the emphasis so often placed on provenance in her line of business. “The table?” she says, answering my query. “The table is Chipplewhite.” She had the panels and cornice installed to give the room gravitas and the hand-painted wallpaper is by the old New York/Chinese firm Gracie. (It puts one in mind of the lines by John Webster: “Tis just like a summer bird-cage in a garden: the birds that are without, despair to get in, and the birds that are within despair and are in a consumption for fear they shall never get out.”) As in so many of her rooms, she positions mirrors to heighten and lengthen the dramatic effect.
The large peach-painted sitting room has a gilded Japanese screen along one wall and the others are covered in close-hung pictures collected over many years. Among them is a painting by the British artist Paul Maze, who taught Winston Churchill painting. Friederike gave it to her late husband, who greatly admired Churchill. The Irish looking glass hangs high over the marble mantelpiece in such a way as to reflect both the room and the huge collection of plates and boxes and objets de vertu that she has tracked down over the years.
Next door is the quiet and donnish library designed by Friederike for Jeremy, who was an avid reader. There’s a nice letter written by a Dr. Prujean in the seventeenth century, asking an architect for a library built for “conveniency and ornament.” This would have answered. On the ceiling is a medallion inscribed with a quotation from Thomas Jefferson: “I cannot live without my books.” Many of these books are first editions and they include all of Churchill’s works.
Friederike’s bedroom, its walls covered with sprigged fabric, epitomizes her style and éclat. The built-in wardrobes, the black lacquer four-poster bed from Rose Tarlow and the comfortable Victorian chairs covered in Brunschwig fabric – have become the architecture of the room.
In her kitchen she reversed the given rule that kitchens are bright and clinical – this is an exercise in brio, a luxurious riot of walls with a rubbed finish of black over Chinese blue limned in gold, of copper, china and enamel; but food is taken seriously here – witness the professional cooker. Friederike has dinner parties for up to forty people. And guess what? Willow-pattern plates and side platters of all hues – as long as they are blue and white – emblazon the kitchen. “Why, Friederike?” I cry, “Why,” looking into her bright blue eyes
“The love for blue and white is revisited from my childhood,” she says. “I had blond hair, usually with braids and blue ribbons. I often dressed in blue. And then the time came for me to outgrow this period. But now I am back in the fold – perhaps the circle is closing!”
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT Gossamer-light swags give the sitting room an alluring glow; the flowered carpet is by Stark. A corner of the kitchen with its black lacquer painted walls, professional cooker and blue and white plates. Another view of the expanded entrance hall, with its black lacquer nineteenth-century furniture and screen. A corner of the library with its mahogany bookcases designed by Friederike.
Friederike’s bathroom has a pretty garlanded cornice and a marble floor. The sprigged fabric on the walls and chair is by Scalamandre, and Meissen figures, decorative plates and Chinese brush pots rest on black lacquer shelves. The French chandelier was found in John Rosselli’s shop in New York.