Julianne Moore brings new life to her beloved family home. The Oscar-winning actress lights up the big screen in 2017 with a hat-trick of high-profile films: Todd Haynes’s Wonderstruck, George Clooney’s Suburbicon, and Matthew Vaughn’s Kingsman: The Golden Circle. Moore fell in love with her West Village NYC townhouse 15 years ago. At the time, the five-story house had been carved up into apartments, but the original front-and-back-parlor configuration was intact, as were the floors, shutters, fireplaces, and staircase.
The renovation was orchestrated by her husband Bart Freundlich's architect brother, Oliver Freundlich, and his then-partners Ben Bischoff and Brian Papa.
The makeover lasted a year and a half, after which the actress stocked the house with a George Nakashima cocktail table, lamps by Isamu Noguchi, a Florence Knoll credenza with rattan doors, and a host of un-pedigreed but sympathetic vintage finds.
As months and years passed, the actress expanded her collections, refined the rooms they inhabit and implemented an extensive redesign of her garden by Brian Sawyer of the AD100 firm Sawyer | Berson (AD, March 2012). She moved the living room downstairs, where it could serve as a casual, semi-cloistered family hangout, and brought the kitchen upstairs. “I cannot recommend more strongly putting your kitchen somewhere with lots of natural light. It changed everything.
The transformative spatial inversion—again executed by brother-in-law Oliver Freundlich—may have taken liberties with period orthodoxy, but the effect is anything but jarring. The kitchen feels like an inviting social space, centered on a slender Parsons-style table (custom-made to fit the room’s proportions) that sits atop a Moroccan carpet. Cooking and storage functions are held to the perimeter. “I don’t really like traditional kitchen cabinets or islands, so I wanted everything to feel like furniture. I copied the hood from a Vincent Van Duysen design I had seen. I met him not long afterward, and I copped to stealing his design,” Moore says.
As part of the latest spatial reorganization, Moore moved her office from the front parlor on the main floor, where foot traffic and street noise were frequent distractions, to a quieter room on an upper floor. She works at a Pierre Jeanneret desk, sitting in a Jeanneret chair, beneath a Paavo Tynell hanging light. The bookshelves beside the desk neatly encapsulate the Julianne Moore story: Family photographs mingle amicably with her Academy Award and a bevy of other professional laurels, alongside stacks of old decorating magazines and monographs on the work of her favorite designers.
A la cornue range stars in the kitchen, beneath a minimalist hood by Best. In the kitchen, a Jack Pierson photograph hangs above a custom-made cabinet by ivory build with Vola sink fittings. Custom table; vintage French chairs and Moroccan rug.
A Noguchi lantern hangs from the original molded ceiling in the living room of Julianne Moore’s New York townhouse. a Sally England cotton rope arch hangs against a wall painted in Farrow & Ball’s pitch black, and a George Nakashima table sits atop a Moroccan rug from the Nazmiyal collection. Martin Eisler chairs; Kawai piano; Paavo Tynell lamp; vintage Florence Knoll cabinet.
A Nan Goldin photograph hangs in the master bath. Kohler tub with Carrara marble surround; Grohe fittings. Cabinet by Willy Van Der Meeren.
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