Silk Stocking Ascendancy

Louise Grunwald

Photo of salon.

In the salon, on a George III mahogany table flanked by Louis XVI chairs, stand a Roman bust from AD 200, a drawing by Bartolomeo Passerotti of the intertwined heads of two demons and a 19th-century Viennese clock with the figure of a horse and rider. On the quarter hour the clock chimes and the rider’s eyes move from side to side.

One of the most warming quotes I know about what and where home is comes from Henry Grunwald, editor-in-chief of Time magazine in its great heyday and, in the latter part of his life, with his beautiful wife, Louise, the US Ambassador to Austria. “Home is the wallpaper above the bed, the family dinner table, the church bells in the morning, the bruised shins of the playground, the small fears that come with dusk, the streets and squares and monuments and shops that constitute one’s first universe.”

The streets and shops that constitute home to Louise Grunwald are on the chicer reaches of the Upper East Side (once dubbed the Silk Stocking district of New York). Over the course of her life – though she has always been thoroughly cosmopolitan and an inveterate traveller – she has lived within a few blocks of where she was born. Now her tranquil and pale apartment in a block designed by Rosario Candela overlooks the dazzling display of daffodils lining the center of Park Avenue in the spring and the tulips in their dance in early summer sunshine.

“As soon as you walk into Louise’s apartment, you feel you’ve set foot in a place that’s been designed to make people look – and sound – their best. There’s a polish, comfort and worldliness about her rooms, and a promise of great conversation, that both relax and stimulate – and make you want to live up to the setting. That promise, by the way, is always fulfilled. People do talk chez Louise, with a vigor and style that may surprise even the professional pundits among them.” I didn’t say that. Ben Brantley, the chief drama critic of the New York Times did – and he knows a fair amount about settings designed to make people sound and look their best. But I would echo it.

Here is a select mixture of comfort and worldliness and sophistication beyond sophistication that has somehow morphed into simplicity. But then simplicity isn’t easy. So although this frankly grand, opulent apartment with its fine rooms and corridors, full of lovely things, could easily be stuck in a conventional time warp, it is animated by the spirit of its chic chatelaine, whip-sharp Louise, who knows how to spring a surprise or two. It is elegant – a rare quality in an interior – and it also has the American quality of freshness.

The paintings are remarkable, including a 1926 Picasso, worked in sand (and signed twice, for some reason) and a Hubert Robert painting of a building ablaze (he was sometimes called Robert des Ruines because of his romantic representations of Roman ruins, and this building is well on the way to becoming his favored subject); one could quite well be taken aback by the fiercely dominating painting Irish Woman on a Bed by Lucian Freud of a naked woman lying on a white bed.

Louise says, smiling, “A friend from London visited soon after I bought it, did a double take and said ‘Oh! I know her!’” (The model, Cozette McCreery, now a fashion designer for her knitwear company, Sibling, was assistant to Bella Freud, Lucian’s daughter, at the time; and looking at it one is reminded of Willem de Kooning’s observation: “Flesh is the reason why oil painting was developed.”) The painting is reflected in a coup d’œil in the eighteenth-century oval giltwood English looking glass; and on a table below is a Degas bronze of a girl precariously pulling on her stockings. On a George III mahogany and gilt side table stands the handsome head of a Roman lady from around AD 200 and an alarming drawing by Bartolomeo Passerotti of the intertwined heads of two demons. I don’t ask.

Many of the treasures in her apartment come from years of visits to flea markets, grand London antique shops and Long Island antique fairs, and from trips to the Middle East. Her first apartment was small, two bedrooms, in a rent-controlled building on East 66th Street. “I loved it.” She was just starting out at Vogue and Diana Vreeland called Billy Baldwin, one of the great exponents of High Style, and asked as a big favor that he would decorate Louise’s apartment for a minimal charge. “Anyway – he did it . . . and when it was about to be photographed for Vogue I called Diana Vreeland in a panic and asked her what I should wear – I had no money to buy anything grand. She said ‘You’ve just been in Egypt – wear a caftan.’” Horst’s photograph of Louise wearing a striped caftan became an iconic image in the sixties, and started a fashion.

Billy Baldwin produced a crisp, stylish, utterly American aesthetic and one that put comfort high on the agenda. She and he became fast friends. “When he took me on he said, ‘What do you want to do now?’ I said, ‘I don“t know.’ ‘Do you like English or French furniture?’ ‘I don’t know.’ He said, in frustration, ‘Is there a house you like?’ I said, ‘I like La Fiorentina.’ He said, ‘Well, you’ve got taste.’” (La Fiorentina was the legendary villa on the tip of Cap Ferrat lived in by Lady Kenmare and her son Rory Cameron, who turned it into a spectacular magnet for luminaries and big cheeses from all over the world. Later Billy Baldwin decorated the villa for its new owners.) “I saw it when Lady Kenmare still lived there, after it was done up by Rory. I was about eighteen and my mother said, ‘You must look around – look at every room, look at what is in it and see how out of every room there is another garden view.’” She looked, and learned about the importance of quality and perfection – and used the knowledge on every aspect of her life, including her appearance (she’s on the International Best Dressed List Hall of Fame.)

She’s witty and hits the nail on the head with precision. Talking about an early encounter with another great American decorator, Albert Hadley (and she has been described as “the model Hadley client”), she said, “There were a lot of boxes around . . . those were the days when we liked to have boxes.” It summed up a vanished era of Boston ferns and Venetian boxes and I couldn’t wait to scuttle home and remove my dated collection.

The simple linen slipcovers on the Louis XVI chairs in her salon hide exquisite original petit point embroidery. Because? “It’s not the look I want now.” (She allowed the chairs to be photographed without the slipcovers without fuss or demur; the same goes for the gleaming empty dinner table that I wanted to see piled with silver.) Comfortable modern chairs sit alongside grand French ones in harmony.

Her first place was the grand family townhouse originally built by Delano & Aldrich for the Cushing family and bought by her mother. “The things in it, though good, were not what would be my taste today.

Photo of Lucian Freud’s Irish Woman on a Bed.

Lucian Freud’s Irish Woman on a Bed, in the salon, overlooks a Degas bronze of a girl pulling on her stockings. On the side table, behind one of a pair of c.1770 George III chairs, a carved hand with furled fingers, bought in Damascus, sits alongside a 19th-century nude by Aristide Maillol.

Photo of salon fireplace.

An unnamed 1926 Picasso, done in sand, above the salon fireplace. On the mantelpiece, a terracotta Hercules wrestles the Nemean lion, in the first of his twelve labors. As well as the Degas bronze are figures including a gymnast by Barthélemy Prieur, and an Egyptian cat dating from around AD 200. The marble life-size female sculpture is Roman, 2nd or 1st century BC. .

“When I married Frederick Melhado he lived in a perfect apartment on East 72nd – like a little Irish house – and which had been done soup to nuts by Albert Hadley. My mother had died and I had inherited some nice furniture but there was only room for a pair of papier mâché chairs.

“We had to move a few years later because Frederick had two children and we needed more room. But it was 1973 and you couldn’t give an apartment away in those days in New York. The first apartment I saw in this building was on the eighth floor, was HUGE − five master bedrooms − and cost $225,000! We bought it – and we lived in it for ten years. Marella Agnelli lived in this building then − well, it was her pied-à-terre, she used it for about a month a year − it was a ‘little’ apartment (by comparison) – and when I got divorced I asked her if I could buy it. Her husband’s brother, Umberto, had to have first crack at it, but he didn’t buy it and I moved here in 1986.”

Naturally, Albert Hadley was on hand and he and Gary Hager of Parish Hadley helped her to turn it into the agreeable and charming place it is today. (The partnership between Sister Parish, as influential in American taste as Nancy Lancaster was in England, and Albert Hadley influenced interior decoration in the US for more than three decades.)

Soon afterwards she met Henry Grunwald at a party. They married three years later. An understatement to say that this meant certain changes. “For a start there were no bookcases. Can you imagine how many books Henry brought to this apartment? Combining his books and mine was like combining two armies.” The bookcases in the morning room, one of the prettiest rooms in the house and really a library, were designed by Albert Hadley, as was the comfortable banquette above which hangs her collection of Old Master drawings. Louise had found a pair of Regency chairs for her bedroom and Parish Hadley made two copies indistinguishable from them – one sits at her William IV dressing table, a Waterford mirror above. Nearby is a nineteenth-century japanned bureau that was found by Sister Parish.

When Henry Grunwald was appointed US Ambassador to Austria Louise’s life changed again. “The Viennese were thrilled to get a big deal as ambassador,” Louise says, “and they wanted to claim him as a native son – but he was in every respect an American and very proud of it.” It was a gratifying reversal – he had had to flee Vienna after the Anschluss and he came back to the city much lauded. She too was a brilliant success in Vienna and, for example, surprised the curators at the Kunsthistorisches Museum by how much she knew about – well – a whole lot of things. “I knew I had to acquit myself. I do my homework before I go someplace and I researched a lot and I had German lessons. We did everything together. I met more people in those two years in Vienna than in my whole life.”

On the japanned bureau in her bedroom is a little model of a white bisque temple. “In my first week in Vienna I saw one just like this. I asked the price. I didn’t buy it. Henry, of course, knew and loved the real temple, a small-scale replica of the Temple of Hephaestus in Athens, built in the nineteenth century and originally designed to house Canova’s sculpture of Theseus in the center of the Volksgarten. I became friends with the curator of the Museum of Applied Arts and told him about it. He said, ‘I know exactly what you are talking about − I bought it for the Museum!’ Years later he calls me up. ‘I’ve seen another model of the temple.’ I bought it immediately.”

She knows her antiques – she was once a partner in M. H. Stockroom Inc., a New York antiques shop – but insists that she is not a collector in the sense that many collectors are, intent on filling the psychic void. “I’ve collected paintings and pictures and sculptures over the years but I’m not a collector in the true sense.”

You could have fooled me. Walking through the rooms and passages I see – among many other delectable things – a drawing of hands by Degas; a Louise Nevelson sculpture; drawings by Klimt; a covetable Hammershøi; two bisque busts of Austrian grandees (one of the Emperor Franz, the other of Prince Schwarzenberg); a painting of Haseley Court by Julian Barrow given to her by Albert Hadley; two handsome Regency paintings of different aspects of an English country house, possibly by Humphry Repton; a cache of David Roberts engravings of Egypt and Petra; an ancient Egyptian sculpture of a cat; a painting by Nicolas Lagneau, many antique Roman and Greek sculptures . . . no, obviously not a collector!

The dining room with its brown-lacquered walls is a tour de force – it took eight base coats to get the proper depth and finish. “The painter was not fancy at all – he was a house-painter, and he did it beautifully.” Hanging above an eighteenth-century neoclassical console table with a St Anne marble top is a pair of paintings by Alexandre-François Desportes depicting Feast and Famine (symbolized by ham and oysters), and light bounces all over the place from a mirrored screen designed by Syrie Maugham. On the sideboard is a rare parade of a Chamberlain Worcester porcelain service.

The star of the room is a William IV circular expanding metamorphic table (it can have leaves added to make it larger), a Jupe table, made by the nineteenth-century English furniture makers Johnstone & Jeanes. She had seen one and wanted one. “I asked a good antiquaire I knew called Mr. Stair to find me one. And he found it! I bought it for £12,000.” The set of magisterial nineteenth-century chairs, green tufted leather with a brass handrail, have a fascinating provenance too. Louise knew Nancy Lancaster − perhaps the most distinguished of all twentieth-century decorators, her work carried out with panache and throwaway elegance. “When I was still living at 72nd Street, Billy Baldwin told me about the sale of some of her furniture at Christie’s. I particularly loved these chairs and went to bid on them. Christie’s originally sold them in two lots of eight each. I bid on one lot and got them – with a faulty memory I recall spending $6,000. I had no place to put them then, so they went into storage. Over the years, I offered to buy the other set from Pamela Harriman, but she wanted mine as well. When I bid on them years later (and stopped at $75,000), I still had no place for them. I had two more made to match, so now I have a set of ten. I have no idea where the other eight are now. It’s a modern antique mystery.”

Photo of 19th-century green leather chairs.

19th-century green leather chairs surround a William IV circular metamorphic Jupe table; the rare Chamberlain Worcester porcelain service was bought at Sotheby’s. In the corner, a mirrored screen from Albert Hadley, designed by Syrie Maugham. On the wall is one of a pair of allegorical paintings by Alexandre-François Desportes

Still here these are, home and proud as punch. Professor Mario Praz, the historian, connoisseur and cynosure of all collectors, summed up this kind of magic: “There is a secret magnetic force that attracts the things desired to the one who covets them.”

Those chairs are still used for her terrific get-togethers – salons, really – and she is saluted as one of the last of the city’s great hostesses; but she has tolled the knell for dinner parties. In an interview in the New York Times, she said, “It’s over. Hardly anyone does them any more. The world is so changed. You may want the dinner party to come back, but it will never happen.” Tell that to any of the great and good New Yorkers, especially the young, who flock to her apartment. She’s living proof that age is irrelevant if you make the sophisticated sphere you live in into a home.

Photo of desk.

In a corner of the library, a Joseph II desk from Vienna displays ancient artifacts, mostly garnered by Louise on her travels in the Middle East. There are cameos of Roman emperors, jade pieces, a Roman glass vase, an ivory bust of Catherine the Great and, on the top, a sculpture depicting the rape of the Sabine women. On a side pedestal, a head of Cleopatra from 300 BC.

Photo of bookshelf.

On top of the bookcase in the hallway are white bisque busts of Emperor Franz and Prince Schwarzenberg; above hangs a painting by the Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershøi.

Photo of chair and wallpaper matching.

A nineteenth-century japanned bureau serves as a home to more white bisque pieces, ranging from a beloved model of the Theseus Temple in Vienna to a sculpture of Louis XVI. Some of Louise’s large collection of rare prints by the nineteenth-century painter David Roberts hang beside the bureau.

Photo of dressing table.

In Louise’s bedroom, a Waterford looking glass hangs above the William IV dressing table; beside the table, one of a set of Regency chairs; above the mirror, a print by the nineteenth-century painter David Roberts. More prints by David Roberts hang beside the bureau.