Tea at Trianon: A Greenwich Village Townhouse

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, October 12, 2022

A Greenwich Village Townhouse

From Architectural Digest:

“I love old black-and-white movies and reading about the Carnegies and the Rockefellers, the history of great houses, and all the people who lived in them,” says Earls. That being said, the couple’s aesthetic trajectory has been an evolution, one that they have eagerly followed. “Our first apartment was a dress rehearsal,” he continues, recalling a largely quiet decor. Next came a Manhattan flat that was all jewel tones, sapphire here and amethyst there, and a safari’s worth of animal prints. This time around, he describes the results as a “dream state, a perfect balance.”
The residence that the Earlses and their 10-year-old daughter, Elle, call home is part of a sprawling redbrick edifice that was formerly the historic Saint Vincent Catholic Medical Centers. Composed of several early- to mid-20th-century structures, the health care behemoth has been reborn over the last few years as Greenwich Lane, deluxe residential units created in collaboration between Rudin Earls’s legendary family of real estate developers (in partnership with the Ofer family’s Global Holdings Management Group), the Manhattan architecture firm FXFowle (now known as FXCollaborative and located in Brooklyn), and interior designer Thomas O’Brien. The couple snapped up one of the development’s town houses and then tapped their favorite decorator to outfit it for them: Alex Papachristidis, the author of The Elegant Life: Rooms That Welcome and Inspire (recently published by Rizzoli with text by myself), who also happens to be Rudin Earls’s adored uncle and a tastemaker to both sides of the young family. He worked on the town house with Fairfax & Sammons, a New York City and Palm Beach architecture firm known for its chic classicism. (Read more.)