by Nate Berkus
When I was growing up, my mom didn’t allow us to eat sugary breakfast cereal. Needless to say, as soon as I got to boarding school in Massachusetts, I proceeded to wolf down about forty-three pounds of Lucky Charms a day—for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The truth is, there are still times when I’d take a bowl of Cap’n Crunch over a four-star meal.
My point is that when you’re born to a household of rules and, in Fabiola’s case, from a background that stresses manners and traditions, it seems to me you’ve got two options: You can become a slave to what you were taught, or your upbringing can create the very foundation that allows you to experiment and take risks. There are people who thumb their nose at tradition because they couldn’t care less, and then there are people who have learned the rules by heart, and respect them, even love them, but feel free to break every single one of them.
Fabiola belongs in the second category. “I’m not the sort of person who buys the latest L-shaped couch, or who spends her days leafing through a cutting-edge design magazine,” she says. If an object pleases her, she doesn’t care what other people think about it. “I try to fill my home with things I genuinely like, and not because I should like them.” My friend understands that decorating is about having a good time, and surrounding yourself with things—in her case, amethyst bangles, plastic flowers, decadent dishes, and whatever else strikes her fancy—whose only purpose is to delight her.
(Illustration Credit 12.5)
For this reason, Fabiola has filled her home with stuff she adores, ranging from antique English chairs and heirloom rugs, to exotic objects and sculptures from her travels in the Far East, to contemporary art from the gallery where she works, to flea market finds, to pieces she’s salvaged from her parents’ and grandparents’ cellars and attics. Throw in a slice of red velvet cake, or one of the cookies she keeps out on her kitchen counter for friends who drop by, and you have a quirky, iconic space that can’t help but charm anybody who walks through the front door.
In her upstairs sitting room, a sculpture of orange-and-yellow butterflies delicately placed on a branch inside a glass canister sits on a vintage tray on top of a black age-worn Chinese table—a gift from Fabiola’s father. The table is flanked by two red-and-white English chairs, while on a sideboard a white ceramic puppy by the artist Jeff Koons stands guard over a stack of magazines, beside a broken tree branch (“It was a dowsing stick, one of those sticks that finds water,” Fabiola says wistfully, “or at least so I dreamed it to be.”). Family china that Fabiola mounted on a living room wall shares space with a wildly colorful sculpture created by a contemporary artist named Dear Raindrop. “I just call it ‘The Piece,’ ” Fabiola says. “Every time I look at it, something pops out at me that I’ve never seen before.” Five miniature Persian wall prints she inherited from her grandmother overlook a set of vintage red bar stools she found at a flea market. Friends have offered to polish up the chrome, but Fabiola absolutely refuses.
She has softened the edges of the modern, triangular space by installing a comfortable, pillow-filled window seat around her dining room table, and adding vintage light fixtures. The glass dining room table balances on three tall exotic drums. “I was part of a drum circle in college,” Fabiola says. “I loved my drums, so instead of throwing them away, or putting them in storage, I leveled them off and use them as my table base.”
Above the table are two unframed Eddie Martinez paintings. Something about the lack of frames makes the beauty of these two pieces come alive, and I can’t take my eyes off of them. But it’s what’s underneath the paintings that never fails to thrill me: a pair of heirloom gold candlesticks (think Versailles!) that Fabiola’s mother gave her, dripping over with a frozen fountain of dark red candle wax. Only a rebellious spirit would be brazen enough to leave red wax all over the table, to find it beautiful and even kind of sexy—which, believe me, it is. “Candle wax is about talking and friendship and fun and late nights,” says Fabiola, adding, “I scrape it off when it starts to get dusty.” The table has another amazing piece on it: a circular glass bowl with an indentation of two cupped hands at its base. The only problem, as Fabiola says, is that when you actually place anything in the bowl, like flowers, the glass hands are concealed. “Sometimes I’ll put a couple of green M&M’s in there,” she says with a laugh.
(Illustration Credit 12.6)
Beside the door that leads to the terrace—where a heavy wooden Balinese couch shares space with four pink flea market chairs—is a small chalkboard. Every time Fabiola has friends over, she writes out their names, as well as what she’s planning to serve. And when they’re done eating, they can take turns sitting in Fabiola’s red beaded African King’s chair that she bought at a Manhattan flea market.
Five black-and-white Helmut Newton nudes strike a pose as you descend the stairwell into an art-and-book-filled sitting room. Fabiola’s goal was to create a sanctuary from the honk and hustle of the city and, again, to soften the concrete modernity of her apartment. “I wanted this room to feel like windows to the sky,” she says. The sitting area does make it seem like you’re drifting across the cosmos, thanks to three dark-green-and-turquoise paintings of clouds and sky. A glass terrarium of ferns rests on a black-and-white Moroccan table she found in a Manhattan antiques store; it’s surrounded by four overstuffed club chairs (she salvaged them from her family’s attic, then re-covered them in red).
(Illustration Credit 12.8)
The bookshelves are made from knotty reclaimed wood Fabiola came across in an upstate New York barn. They spill over with books, photographs, a ukulele, a big china bulldog, a vintage alarm clock, and additional souvenirs from her travels overseas. Other books devoted to fashion and design perch like mini art installations at the bottom of the stairs and along the hallway that leads to her bedroom. Then there’s the bamboo chair hanging from the ceiling chain underneath the eave of the stairwell. Fabiola likes to dangle there and read from time to time.
When she’s not cocooned in the sitting room, she’s usually tucked away in her cozy guest bedroom, a room she says was inspired by her grandmother, a patroness of the arts who kept a similar spot in her house, to host young visiting artists and musicians. A daybed covered with tartan throws and pillows sits on a black-and-white wool rug. Behind the couch is a wall covered with prints from all eras and cultures, dominated by a huge round mirror whose original gold leaf Fabiola repainted black, as well as a centuries-old piece of fabric she bought from an antiques collector in Thailand and hung in an ornate gold frame. Leave it to Fabiola to decide that what works best with a piece of ancient Thai fabric is a totally contemporary flowerpot sculpted entirely out of spray cans. The juxtaposition makes both things look even more extraordinary. A small television sits across from the bed, not that anyone would ever know it, as the screen is covered with a playful, hand-woven Peruvian fabric of two tigers. “I have a pet peeve about TVs,” Fabiola says.
(Illustration Credit 12.10)
“My mother would always tell me, ‘You don’t photograph your bedroom,’ ” Fabiola says. Clearly the advice didn’t take, since she leads me into the calm, shadowed room where she sleeps. In search of a nontraditional place to lay her head, she found a Balinese canopied bed that reminds her of the antique four-poster she slept in as a child. The wood, the teak, the height, the carvings on the headboard, and the white silken sashes all say “exotic, mysterious, ultra-feminine”—but the I pillow says “girl with a BlackBerry.” There is no bedside table, no stack of books, no reading lamp. “I like all that stuff to be hidden,” she says.
(Illustration Credit 12.13)
More than any other space in the apartment, Fabiola loves her dressing room. “I mean, c’mon,” she says. I see what she’s talking about. The place is like a grotto, or a rain forest, or the perfect getaway. You almost expect an old Gypsy woman to appear from the shadows with a finger pressed to her lips. The first thing you see is a large figurine of a gray cat hanging over the antique French writing desk Fabiola h
as converted into a makeup table. On second glance, it could be a lion, or a puma, but it doesn’t really matter. Ringed by fur, it looks up with a surprised, fairly fierce expression. The cat, which Fabiola bought from a student artist, oversees the beads, belts, and bangles that seem to drip from everywhere. Jackets and blouses tilt out suggestively from the closets, while inside are drawers devoted to scarves, dark glasses, handbags, bracelets, brooches, and some of the most fantastic rings I’ve ever seen.
Fabiola’s mirror is covered with a piece of black lace. Beside it stands a vintage lamp with no lamp shade whose squiggly, old-school lightbulb was found in a vintage lighting store; and a lorgnette made of chocolate (the woman has chocolate opera glasses) sits amid half a dozen perfume bottles on an antique tray. Hanging against the wall is a chalkboard that she uses to scrawl messages to herself, some of them real, some of them made up, including “Lunch with Grace Jones” and “Must reply to Mick Jagger” and, my personal favorite, “Call Prince Charles back—again!”
I keep returning to the two photo boards, and not only because I happen to be in one of them. For reasons I can’t quite fathom, let alone explain, in one of the photos I’m sinking my teeth into someone’s foot. I have absolutely no memory of where that picture was taken, but my guess is there was a fair amount of tequila involved. Can I just say again what a lack of self-consciousness it takes not only to exhibit a photo board, but to position the thing at the foot of your bathtub, adjacent to a large painting showing an oversized Mickey Mouse being terrorized by real white mice? “I’ve been making photo boards since I was a kid,” Fabiola says. “You can see the progression of life and sometimes even love.” She closes her eyes and is momentarily transported. “It feels almost like a relic from another time.”
(Illustration Credit 12.16)
I think she’s right. I also think that years from now, Fabiola’s interior will be remembered, celebrated, and loved as much as I love it today. Why? Because she allows candle wax to drip and drip on her dining room table, and because she hangs mesmerizing paintings without frames above that table, and because she stacks her art and fashion and design books on her hallway floors. Because she combines mid-century caned chairs with an incredible piece of modern art with Persian miniature prints and a red beaded African King’s chair and the most delicious red velvet cake I’ve ever tasted. Because she makes no apologies for who she is, and what brings her joy. If our spaces are made up of a symphony of voices that come together to create the music we love living with, Fabiola has found a wild melody.
(Illustration Credit 13.1)
It’s rare that I come across someone whose design style is so clear, and whose palette is so succinct, that I find myself marveling at the clarity of that person’s space. I mean, you can’t help but be charmed by a home so compact and unified that by merely floating three branches of green hydrangea in a bowl on the mantelpiece, or laying out a handful of orangey-red leaves, or plugging in a cord of small white holiday bulbs, its owner serves notice that the seasons have changed from spring to summer, summer to fall, and fall to winter. On top of a steep hill in the Catskills, Sandy Foster has created that place, an ethereal, harmonious dreamscape where time stands so still you can practically hear the flowers growing.
MANY OF US HAVE A MOMENT WHEN WE REALIZE WE’RE WAITING FOR OUR LIVES TO BEGIN.…WHAT ARE WE WAITING FOR?
What I love so much about this space isn’t just what Sandy did, it’s what she didn’t do. From the four exterior porch columns to the peeling hunter-green front door, to the raw industrial legs of a table salvaged from the side of a country road, Sandy has thought a lot about every design choice both inside and outside her 400-square-foot fantasy getaway. And though it’s taken some time and research and serious bargain hunting, by surrounding herself with what she wants, Sandy is at long last getting what she needs.
The interior space is a mix of curbside and flea market finds, Victorian mirrors, and objects Sandy just plain loves. The house may be a study in white, but its textures, from intricate lace to chipped paint to unfinished wood, keep things interesting. Anchoring the cottage is a white love seat filled with puffed-up pillows in chamois-soft cases. A metal chandelier strung with crystal beads hangs from the ceiling, its chain swathed in white linen (courtesy of an old shirt that Sandy cut up, sewed together again, and scrunched over the chain). Against the far wall are old French doors, behind which are scattered, among other things, Christmas ornaments and design magazines bundled in twine. To my right, a white table stands on its original rusted sawmill legs, holding half a dozen folded white linens. The nearly seven-foot-tall ceiling is made from vintage pieces of stamped tin that Sandy repainted white. Mirrors hang and tilt from every wall, and if you stand on your tiptoes, you see a white sleeping loft that would go perfectly with a cup of chamomile tea and a good bodice ripper.
Many of us have a moment when we realize we’re waiting for our lives to begin. And that always makes me wonder: What are we waiting for? We keep our best plates and stemware out of sight, hidden in a hutch, or tucked away in a buffet. We figure that one of these days we’ll have a special occasion or we’ll throw a big party and they’ll be great. But all that fine china ends up staying put. Along with the matching silver. That serving set we inherited from our great-grandmother? It might break. So we stick with our everyday stuff, when only a few feet away the plates and bowls and glasses and forks and knives and spoons are on standby, waiting to become part of the life that, for one reason or another, we’re just not giving ourselves permission to live.
Sandy remembers what finally shook her awake. It was 2008, the year she began thinking seriously about building her own house. Since college, she’d been collecting good china at flea markets. One Saturday afternoon she finally decided to sit down and unwrap her plates, only to see that the newspaper she was using to protect them was dated 1996. Let’s think about this: In 1996, rebels were fighting Russian soldiers in Chechnya, Tom Cruise was showing Cuba Gooding Jr. the money in Jerry Maguire, and Sandy Foster was storing away all the stuff that brought her pleasure for what would turn out to be twelve long years. “It took me until 2008 to actually use that china,” Sandy says with a sigh. “Up until that moment, I was waiting for the day when someone would step in and help me lead the life I had going on in my head.”
Sandy had had that picture-perfect life in her head ever since she was a kid. Growing up in a treeless Long Island suburb of cookie-cutter houses, she was always drawn to old things, particularly the graceful, character-filled turn-of-the-century architecture of her grandparents’ house in Detroit. But grace was in short supply during Sandy’s adolescence. Her father, a radio announcer, had substance abuse issues, and was often out of work. One day, Sandy, a high school honors student, came home to find her family being evicted from their house. A week later, her parents had put most of their belongings in storage, bought a tent, and begun moving from one state park to the next.
Sandy told no one, even though her family’s homelessness was staring everybody in the face, and there were many nights spent in sleeping bags on the floor of a friend’s basement. A few years later, after completing college (thanks to a whole lot of student loans), Sandy realized that what she craved more than anything else was stability, a nest where she could feel safe.
Despite its miniature proportions, Sandy’s cottage is surprisingly airy. The illusion of space is helped by countless mirrors, among them a French rococo-style floor-to-ceiling mirror from the 1920s that she picked up at a yard sale for $22. The mirror was originally the color of a Band-Aid, but Sandy painted it white, and then distressed it, though the beautiful ghosted, beveled glass speaks for itself. Hanging off the mirror are a fragile pair of angel wings that Sandy made out of baling wire she bought at a tractor supply store, and then tarnished.
She decorated her mantel with a $2 bowl, and it looks as perfect sitting there as anything at Baccarat could. Her billowing white curtains come from Target (total cost: less than $25), and are a
ttached to the window frames with clear pushpins. She chose to leave some sawhorse legs, as well as a door she rescued from another house, unfinished, because they cut through what she calls “the saccharine sweetness” of her girlish style. For the record, I like them this way, too. I also like that she’s bold enough to showcase a sculptural-looking tree branch because she realizes that at the end of the day nature is really a pretty hard thing to improve on.
Think about the joy we get from surrounding ourselves with stuff that is well loved, maybe a little dog-eared, or even altogether imperfect; stuff that we’ve shared over the years with friends and family. Imagine putting your hand on a doorknob that’s been around for 150 years, versus, say, a gleaming new one that makes a little clicking sound when you turn it. Are there pieces in your home that sing a little song to you every time you walk by, things you love to touch, things that instantly transport you to a different time and place, things that knit you into the world in some way?
Sandy has this connection to everything in her tiny house, whether it’s a dried-out fish vertebrae she found on the beach, a set of antique wine tumblers lined up against a windowsill, or the wirework baskets she’s taken to collecting. Her latest discovery is a church candlestick inspired by a design trend that’s popular across Scandinavia. Bypassing the $500 it would cost to buy a new one, and with the help of heavy wire clippers and tin-cutting scissors, she sliced flowers, leaves, and grapes out of scrap tin, then wrapped everything tight with 22-gauge wire. The candlestick, known in Denmark as a “kirkenstagel,” sits proudly on the white, blistered-wood mantelpiece.