Across the time Brooke Shields celebrated her sixteenth birthday, she and her mom/supervisor, Teri, purchased a townhouse on the Higher East Facet.
“It was quiet, and it was luxurious, in that we had area in New York. We had a yard. It was such a privileged and protected technique to develop up in the course of Manhattan,” mentioned Ms. Shields, 57, who, since her days as a baby mannequin, actor {and professional} Calvin Klein denims fanatic, has starred in tv collection and Broadway musicals, written books, designed jewellery, based the digital platform Starting is Now and appeared in a variety of films. (Her newest, “Vacation Concord,” will probably be launched this week on HBO Max.)
However circumstances and financial institution balances change, and because the years glided by, “I wanted to simplify my belongings, so to talk,” Ms. Shields mentioned.
“As I acquired older, I wasn’t working as a lot and had some choices to make. I ended up getting married, and my husband simply hated New York,” she continued, referring to Andre Agassi, the tennis star. “He talked me into promoting the home, and the day I needed to give it up was so unhappy, due to all of the Thanksgivings in that home and all of the reminiscences.”
Brooke Shields, 57
Occupation: Actor
Limitless love: “All of the issues I liked about residing within the townhouse on the Higher East Facet are what my household has skilled right here. Now we have all these traditions that my daughters actually hook into and which are a supply of consolation to them.”
Ms. Shields relocated, divorced, remarried, purchased a loft downtown along with her new husband, Chris Henchy, a screenwriter and producer, and had two daughters, Rowan, now 19, and Grier, 16.
However finally, the loft began to really feel like a decent squeeze, and the search was on for a brownstone.
“This had been a dream for me as a result of I needed my children to have what I had had with my home on the Higher East Facet: to have a sense of neighborhood, and to have the area which is so onerous to come back by and so costly in New York,” Ms. Shields mentioned. “We regarded all over the place, however one place was extra miserable than the subsequent.”
Lastly, an actual property agent directed Ms. Shields’s consideration to an early Twentieth-century Greek Revival constructing within the West Village that had been transformed from a single-family dwelling into an eight-unit house home.
She was instantly smitten. “It had been damaged up and was actually destroyed, nevertheless it was as if I might see the entire thing sooner or later,” she mentioned. “I known as my husband, who was in L.A. — this was earlier than you would do full movies in your telephone — and I mentioned, ‘I do know you’re not right here to see it, however I simply have this loopy feeling.’”
They purchased it, closing on the deal in early 2008, and employed MADE, a Brooklyn-based design/construct agency, to do a intestine renovation. The couple’s temporary for the home was easy: Put it again the best way it was. To the extent attainable, they needed to take out what was there, restore it and set it again in place.
“We tried to maintain as a lot of the flooring and the steps as we might,” Ms. Shields mentioned. “The coffin nook was big for me, as a result of it was authentic to the home.”
Every thing, it appeared, was a candidate for rehabilitation. When the basement was dug out, a number of large rocks have been excavated, “and we put them within the yard as stools,” Ms. Shields mentioned. The coal bunker was saved and repurposed to carry a wine closet from an outdated ship — Ms. Shields’s tenth anniversary current to Mr. Henchy. In some situations, issues have been salvaged from elsewhere: The stone hearth mantel in the lounge was rescued from the Plaza Resort when it was renovated in 2008.
Ms. Shields needed the décor to evoke a London townhouse. For assist, she and Mr. Henchy turned to their buddy David Flint Wooden, a British designer. He nudged them towards a mixture of furnishings, supplies and durations: hand-blocked Zuber wallpaper, Asian porcelain, neo-Classical Italian tables. Jute and Lucite are additionally represented.
The collaboration yielded areas which are stylish however heat, that blend the elegant with the whimsical. In the lounge, Louis XVI-style armchairs and a French Empire commode coexist with small framed photos of rabbits, portraits of Ms. Shields’s daughters sporting sweet crowns and a coronary heart portray by Keith Haring, a present from the artist.
“I’m not into being austere or severe,” Ms. Shields mentioned.
And she or he is most undoubtedly not into fetishizing her possessions. “I grew up saving issues, after which by the point I needed to put on one thing, it was both out of fashion or didn’t match,” Ms. Shields mentioned. “So now my angle is, ‘What am I ready for?’”
The crystal stemware on open cabinets in a nook of the kitchen? She drinks from it. The decanter she efficiently bid on throughout an public sale at Chatsworth Home, certainly one of England’s stateliest properties? She pours whiskey from it (admittedly, good whiskey).
She pulled open a utensil drawer and yanked out a handful of sterling silverware gathered from various sources. “I really like the actual fact,” she mentioned, “that I can sit down and use one thing that was in somebody’s home ceaselessly.”
As a result of Ms. Shields grew up amid unpacked bins — “My mom by no means completed transferring in wherever” — she was initially intent, she mentioned, “on having this home fully completed.”
However she has backed off from such finality. “I get new issues, and I discover new issues,” she mentioned. Proper now, she is noodling with the association of the barware in the lounge — it features a sterling silver cup that her grandfather, Frank Shields, an beginner tennis star of the Nineteen Twenties and 30s, received at a match. And bearing in mind the latest arrival of a cargo of Murano glasses, the spoils of a household journey to Italy, she is rethinking the tablescape on the eating room sideboard. Ms. Shields can be considering an addition to the aspect desk that holds her rising assortment of crystal match strikers.
“I’m going to Oklahoma quickly, and I wager there are some nice little antiques locations there,” she mentioned. “What do I would like? Nothing. However I’ve acquired the match strikers. Now I’d like to discover a sterling candle snuffer.”
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