carnegie hill north salem park avenue upper west

new york cottages & gardens october 2015
New York Cottages and Gardens
CARNEGIE
HILL
NORTH SALEM
PARK AVENUE
UPPER
WEST SIDE
WESTCHESTER
COUNTY
cottagesgardens.com
LUXE
LAIRS
COTTAGESGARDENS.COM | OCTOBER 2015
JEWEL
BOX
A two-bedroom
apartment in
Carnegie Hill gets
a shimmery
update, thanks
to designer
Garrow Kedigian’s
discriminating eye
BY CINDI COOK
PHOTOGRAPHS BY FRAN PARENTE
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Palette Pleaser
The living room
includes a sofa
upholstered in Lee
Jofa’s Spectrum
Velvet, a Jessica
Charles swivel
chair, and a Garrow
Kedigian–designed
wood and linen
cocktail table. The
walls are painted
Benjamin Moore’s
Rattan, mixed with
black; the mirror is
from Bardin Palomo.
See Resources.
Objets Of Affection
In the dining area (near
left and opposite), a
Kedigian-designed
banquette, covered
in a Cowtan & Tout
velvet, and metal
klismos chairs sit
below a Marlowe 16
lantern from Remains
Lighting. The bust
rests on a column
from Hamptons
Antique Galleries. The
1920s carpet in the
living room (below) is
from Turkmenistan;
the Gustavian-style
cocktail table features
a Calacatta marble top.
See Resources.
T
he quintessential New York apartment: To many people, it’s a smart,
sophisticated abode, neatly tucked
inside a handsome building on a
picturesque uptown block. But when Chris Franklin went searching for his version, what he found didn’t quite match the vision—at
first. The petite two-bedroom, located in a circa-1980s building on
a leafy block just off Central Park, was chock-full of parquet floors,
stark white walls, and awkward closets that took up space, rather
than saved it. However, the floor-through unit, which sits opposite
the Beaux-Arts Cartier Mansion in Carnegie Hill, had immense
potential, and Franklin knew he had found a diamond in the rough.
To make his Manhattan dream come true, he turned to Garrow
Kedigian, an interior designer he had met at the Kips Bay
Decorator Show House in 2009. Franklin had liked Kedigian’s
work so much that he kept the designer’s card tucked into a mirror,
knowing it might come in handy someday. “His design was inspira-
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“A FEW DAYS AFTER I CALLED GARROW, I HAD
A STACK OF HAND-DRAWN DESIGNS”
Second To None
A papier-mâché bust of Julius
Caesar surveys the second
bedroom (this spread), which
includes a Kedigian-designed
daybed and a trio of Grace
Kelly Warhol plates that
homeowner Chris Franklin
bought in Monaco. The walls
are painted Benjamin Moore’s
Spanish Red; the side chair,
purchased at Christie’s, is
covered in a Brunschwig &
Fils bee print. See Resources.
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KEDIGIAN’S CLIENT
WANTED FORMAL,
BUT WITH A CASUAL
UNDERCURRENT,
“WHICH WAS EXACTLY
IN LINE WITH MY
THINKING. I DON’T
DO FUSSY”
tional, and aspirational,” says Franklin, a finance executive. “A
few days after I called Garrow, I had a stack of hand-drawn
designs that became the blueprint for everything we did.”
“Chris and I were very much in sync,” says Kedigian,
who also makes his home on the Upper East Side—in Fred
Astaire’s former digs, no less—and who embraces an aesthetic
he calls “streamlined classic.” His client wanted formal, but
with a casual undercurrent, “which was exactly in line with
my thinking. I don’t do fussy.”
The renovation and design program took a little more than
a year to complete, giving Kedigian ample opportunities to
experiment. Color came first and foremost, from accent pillows in shades of khaki and burnt yellow to master bedroom
walls doused in a metallic-finish gray/green to the second
bedroom’s statement-making ultra-high-gloss persimmon.
(The luxurious, laborious paint job throughout was done by
Jenny Schueler of J. Gordon Painted Finishes—“true artisans,”
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Kedigian says.) To unify the open kitchen, dining area, and
living room—which converge into one space—Kedigian created height where there wasn’t any, applying high-gloss paint
in two tones that stretch up and across the ceiling. “The colors physically suggest distinct regions,” he explains. “An open
kitchen can be challenging when it comes to maintaining a
sense of elegance, but I think we pulled it off.”
Kedigian knows a thing or two about elegance. Prior to
bceoming a designer, he was a nationally ranked figure skater
in his native Canada (he won gold at nationals at the age of
ten) and is a classical pianist as well. “When I was three, I
told my parents that I wanted a grand piano for my birthday,
and they bought me one!” he recalls. Raised in Montreal by a
Canadian-Armenian father and a French-Armenian mother,
he visited his grandmother annually at her chic 12-room
apartment in Paris. Growing up in such beautiful surroundings led to Kedigian’s passion for interiors, which he indulged
Bespoke Affair
In the master bedroom
(this spread), vintage
Jansen bureaus flank
an Edward Ferrell
+ Lewis Mittman
Honey bed; the
pelmet canopy and
bed curtain are made
from an Armani
Casa fabric. The
Kedigian-designed
blue-velvet Hadley
chair is trimmed in
Clarence House’s
Grand Galon Athenee.
The sconce is from
Circa Lighting and the
carpet is Patterson
Flynn Martin. See
Resources.
in as a young adult after landing a gig working for William
Hodgins, the respected Boston-based decorator.
Following in his mentor’s formidable footsteps, Kedigian
fashioned a tour de force in Franklin’s dining area, a
cocoon-like corner hugged by built-in bookcases with
turquoise backing and an old-world air, dramatically
separated from the living room by a heavy, theatrical
curtain. But the pièce de résistance is what Kedigian terms
“the foreign element,” the unexpected component that
turns a room on its head—in this case, the linencovered cocktail table in the living room, carved from a
single piece of wood and painted a bright turquoise. In
an apartment laden with treasures, it’s most certainly the
crown jewel. “I wanted my home to be warm and welcoming without it looking outdated ten years from now,”
Franklin enthuses. “It was an amazing transformation, but not
what I envisioned at all. It’s so much better.” ✹
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