“This graciously scaled dining room in Greenwich Village had everything one might want in a proper dining room-but no window. That limitation became the germ of an idea. We commissioned artist Kevin Paulsen to paint a fantastical all -encompassing landscape mural where history meets contemporary imagination. The result is a room that offers more of a view than a mere window could ever provide.”
While throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, the riverside hamlet of Nyack, New York, bustled with a thriving shipbuilding industry, today, the locale is better known as a much sought-after community just forty-five-minute from the gridded streets of Manhattan.
Established clients of Glenn Gissler Design were looking for a weekend property when we found a newly-built architect-designed shingle-style Colonial Revival home on the Hudson River. The rooms were gracious and well-detailed yet not ostentatious, with remarkable river views, presenting the perfect backdrop for a restrained mix of contemporary, vintage, and antique furnishings.
A color palette of tempered marine blues, celadon, and sophisticated neutrals was chosen, paying homage to the verdant landscape and gleaming water beyond the structure’s facade. The resulting spaces are comfortably classic and ideally suited to the stunning naturalistic panoramas.
With the interiors complete, the focus turned to the client’s wish for a pool and cabana, presenting a daunting set of challenges. Working closely with an engineer, landscape designer, and an experienced pool builder, the team moved the earth–quite literally–to create a plateau for a resort-inspired infinity edge pool. The resulting terrace appears effortlessly carved into the landscape—as if it has always been there—the ultimate hallmark of successful exterior design.
A stylized Chinese-inspired chain-link motif unfolds across a custom-designed area rug, establishing a colorful dialog with two armchairs in the style of Jacques Adnet, upholstered in similarly-hued paisley. Two lean classical end tables, a custom-colored linen table at the center, and a cast bronze thorn-leg table by Herve van der Straeten provide gracious space for a pair of white crackle-glazed lamps, drinks, books, and cherished mementos.
Three pendant lights are hung from a blue ceiling in the dining room, lending rhythmic gravitas to the room’s lighting. Lush linen curtains frame the windows and French doors. Subtle curves define the suite of chairs, while Winged Creature (2014), by Frank Bowling, takes pride of place above the marble-and-millwork mantle.
In this vignette, a Gustavian chest, one of a pair flanking a custom upholstered bed, is coupled with a cylindrical, mother-of-pearl inlaid side table. The rock crystal lamp is ingeniously produced from the detritus of larger crystal cuttings wired together, from CL Sterling & Sons.
A teak table and fretwork chairs, which allude to the stair railings in the home’s entry, are arranged on a bluestone terrace just off the kitchen, providing seating for an intimate meal.
by Fred A. Bernstein
Photography by Peter Murdock
JUNE 12, 2022
It takes GLENN GISSLER almost two hours to drive from his apartment in Brooklyn Heights to his weekend house in northwestern Connecticut. So, he might envy his clients — an investment banker, his wife and their young daughter — who live in a Lower Manhattan loft. Getting to their weekend house, in Nyack, New York, takes all of 45 minutes. And that includes crossing the Hudson River, which the city apartment and the country house overlook from opposite sides.
Nine years ago, when they bought the Manhattan apartment, the couple hired Gissler to design its interiors, a job that included helping them assemble a collection of ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONIST ART. Then, three years ago, when they started looking for a weekend house, they turned to Gissler for advice. After a few false starts, the couple found a newly constructed COLONIAL REVIVAL/shingle-style home that fronts the river at its widest point. Architect David Neff had given the 5,200-square-foot home traditional details while keeping the interiors open and light.
“The rooms are well proportioned, not too grandiose,” Gissler says. And the setting couldn’t be better. The house, he says, is set high enough to offer spectacular Hudson River views and low enough to feel close to the water.
The couple bought it, and Gissler proceeded to outfit the interiors with a smart mix of new and old furniture, much of it European. “The house is very much American, but it’s not AMERICANA,” says the designer, who studied architecture and fine arts at the Rhode Island School of Design, then worked for an architect (Rafael Viñoly) and an interior designer (JUAN MONTOYA) before founding his own practice, in 1987.
Here, Gissler leads Introspective on a tour of the house, on which he collaborated with his senior designer, Craig Strulovitz, also a RISD graduate.
by Lisa Zeiger
by Glenn Gissler
Photography by Joshua McHugh
Joe D’Urso — a pioneer of forward-looking, minimalist modernism — designed the apartment of Bruce and Arlene Simon on New York’s Upper West Side more than 40 years ago. Thanks to the Simons’ careful upkeep — she’s a well-known preservation advocate — it remains a study in sleek black, white and gray. Top: For the dining room, D’Urso created a modular table system (one leaf hangs from the wall when not in use, looking like an Ad Reinhardt painting deployed as bulletin board), and he added chairs in the style of Marcel Breuer’s 1920s Cesca design.
Even in the analog days of the 1970s, word traveled fast about a certain emerging and remarkably talented interiors star. His name was Joe D’Urso, and he was shaking up the design world.
I still remember the first time I saw his work, just after I graduated from high school and 10 years before I would start a design practice of my own. It was in Architectural Digest’s November/December 1976 issue, which featured a New York City home D’Urso had reinvented as an exemplar of High Tech design, the extreme minimalist–modernindustrial style that had become his signature. The Upper West Side apartment was unlike anything I had ever seen or imagined.
The space, located at the top of a West 67th Street Gothic-revival
His design for the home’s soaring main space, a double-height living room overlooked by a balcony originally intended to accommodate musical performances, felt radically new.
He furnished the space sparsely, with a few blocky, rolling black-Formica coffee tables and a couple of low-slung woven chairs set on a high carpeted platform. That plinth was one of several he created to break up and define various sections of the room, using one as a sofa, another as a daybed, and one even as a table. To help balance out the cavernous volume, D’Urso suspended a large split-leaf philodendron on wires from the ceiling, and Arlene added black canvas pillows to the extended built-in sofa, with more on the daybed near the fireplace.
