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My mom, Gloria Vanderbilt, lived many different lives, in many different rooms, but these spaces were her last; a two-bedroom apartment on the first floor of a quiet building in a quiet cul-de-sac in Manhattan, with another two-bed apartment just below it, where she’d paint and write. She was 95 when she died in 2019 and had lived in grand penthouses, town houses, hotel suites, beach houses and country estates. But these apartments are where she chose to burrow in, living and working in them for the last 23 years of her life. She’d never stayed in one place for so long.
My mom cared deeply about the spaces she inhabited. She thought about them, worked on them, loved them, grew dissatisfied with them and changed them often, with a passionate intensity perhaps only readers of WoI, her favourite magazine, can fully appreciate. It was by no means a hobby or a passing fancy. It wasn’t something to be left to others. The rooms she created weren’t just a refuge. They were an essential part of who she was.
She wasn’t a fussy collector of one style of furniture or of a particular artist’s work. She’d lived with many of the same objects and furniture for decades, moving them from place to place. The only provenance that mattered to her was personal. Everything was infused with memory, meaning and mystery. Her rooms revealed secrets and stories about her that were as intimately autobiographical as any memoir she ever wrote.
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Above: If you were visiting my mom early one evening, you’d likely find her in her living room, ensconced, barefoot, on one of two sofas. A few logs might be burning in the fireplace, one of four in these apartments that she painted herself, but the scent in the air – notes of pine, cedar, lavender, the smells of my childhood lit on the silver Max Kuehne table. There’d be music playing in another room – Billie Holiday, Peggy Lee, Laurie Anderson perhaps. Her tastes were wide-ranging.
Wherever you happened to be standing or sitting, my mom had planned what she wanted you to see. No matter the angle of your repose, something beautiful and intriguing would be available to gaze upon.
Two large portraits flanked the livingroom hearth. To the right was a stunning Dana Pond painting of Mom’s mother, Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt, who posed for it while on her honeymoon in Paris in the early 1920s. The frame is by the House of Heydenryk, a 170-year-old company my mom used for decades for all her paintings. Around it there was a Victorian lamp, a small painting by my mom, and, on the other side of the portrait, a painting by her cousin, Gerta Conner, granddaughter of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, as well as an ever-changing assortment of other objects, framed letters and drawings by friends. The small sculpture on the green table is by the mother of her friend Richard Avedon. I bought it for her from the photographer’s estate, along with a painting of hers he had bought in the 1950s.
On the other side of the fireplace, there was a large portrait of my mom by Aaron Shikler. It was painted in the mid-1980s. Though Gloria loved it, my brother and I were never very fond of it. It is beautifully executed, but we thought it was a portrait of her public persona, not the person she actually was. Interestingly, years later, Shikler and my mom dated, and he surprised her with a small portrait he painted of her reclining on a sofa. It captures her perfectly and hangs in my house today.
On a small Syrian bone-inlay table just in front of the Shikler, there was a stack of old letters bound with twine in a small plexiglass box. It was one of my mom's ‘Dream Boxes’, a series of assemblages she made years back. This was my favourite. She’d found the letters at a flea market and liked to imagine what secrets they contained. Was it the correspondence of young lovers separated by misfortune? The returned letters of a spurned suitor? What had happened to the writer and the recipient? She could have cut the twine and discovered whatever mysteries the letters contained, but what would be the fun in that? So she kept them tightly bound and on display.
Above: When you opened the front door of the first-floor apartment, it was like lifting the lid of a jewel box. She’d mirrored both sides of the entrance hall and hung paintings and collages on top of the mirrors. The effect on stepping inside was delightfully disorientating. You found yourself in a kaleidoscope of colours and reflected light from sconces and chandeliers. The wooden floor was painted a shiny black; the ceiling and remaining walls a shocking pink. Your eyes would settle on a pastel painting by Miguel Covarrubias, a Mexican artist best known in the USA for his cover illustrations for the New Yorker and Vanity Fair. It’s a portrait of Cathleen Vanderbilt, my mother’s half-sister, whom she only got to know briefly before she died in Cuba in 1944 at the age of 40. Cathleen is wearing a blue turban and fur coat, cherubs flying around her elongated head and eyes. Stylised certainly, but not as much as you might think. The Vanderbilts were known for their distinctive, heavily lidded eyes.
Reflected in the mirror behind the Covarrubias on the opposite mirrored wall, you can glimpse a collage my mom made in the 1970s. Beneath it, on a thin table, is a box she made out of seashells, as well as small busts by Zita Davisson of my brother Carter and me as children.
There was much my mom sought and found in the rooms she created, but much she couldn’t find as well. They gave her comfort and pleasure, endless inspiration, but they never satisfied her for long.
‘I try to create order and stability round me,’ she told me in an email correspondence we turned into a book called The Rainbow Comes and Goes; ‘but it never gets near where the trouble really is. I design a room and I’m enchanted with the changes for a while, but then I think, “No, no, this isn’t right at all; it has to be another way.” I just hung mirrors on one entire wall of my bedroom. I loved the look at first. It had a magical Alice Through the Looking-Glass ambience. “Perfect,” I thought. Now it just seems like a wall of mirrors.’
She had encountered a Welsh word – hiraeth – that had great significance for her. It has no direct translation, but one definition she liked was ‘a homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, a home which maybe never was; the nostalgia, the yearning, the grief for the lost places of your past.’ I think that explains a lot about my mom and the rooms she created. She felt that hiraeth all her life.
Beneath the Virgin Queen, in another of her ‘Dream Boxes’, hung delicate pink clothing she wore as a toddler, not long after her father, Reginald Vanderbilt, drank himself to death. It was the first in a series of tumultuous events in her childhood that ultimately led in 1934 to the so-called ‘trial of the century’, a widely publicised custody battle between her widowed mother and her father’s sister, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney.
When she painted the fireplace in the bedroom, writing a quote from Einstein on it about the nature of time, and lining the hearth with mirrors, she insisted I come over to see it before the paint was even dry. ‘Close your eyes,’ she said when I arrived and took me by the hand to place me where she wanted me to stand to get the full effect. ‘It’s fantastic, Mom,’ I said, and it was. It always was. There was no- one quite like her.
Visiting these rooms after her death was sad, of course, but also deeply comforting. She was still so present in them, so alive in them. It’s why it took me two years before I could even consider letting them go. Wendy Goodman, a good friend of hers with whom she’d worked on a photo book, The World of Gloria Vanderbilt, reminded me that my mom would have likely already changed these rooms by then. She would have transformed them into something else entirely. My mom filled her rooms with personal history, but she wasn’t entombed by them, and neither should I be.
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There were no rules my mom followed in the rooms she lived in. There was only her imagination, her fantasy, her hiraeth. After she died, I found a note she’d written to herself and placed in a shagreen box on a shelf near her bed. It was a fragment of a line by TS Eliot – ‘and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time’.
A version of this article appeared in the February 2023 Issue of The World of Interiors. Learn about our subscription offers
