EDITORIAL VISION

With help from architect and longtime friend Basil Walter, legendary editor Graydon Carter brings signature flair—and a host of beloved objects—to a new apartment in Greenwich Village

- NATHAN KING

FOR ALL THAT’S BEEN WRITTEN about design and architecture, relatively little ink has been spilled on the subject of storage units. They tend to be dismissed as backwaters of impulse, dingy pens filled with the lame beasts we collect in our travels but never cull. And anyone who’s had to keep his life’s possessions in such a place has probably had to fend off that nasty little cough of a word: hoarder.

To Graydon Carter, a founder and coeditor of Air Mail and former editor of Vanity Fair, all of this seems terribly unfair. “No, hoarding is when you save newspapers,” he says. “What this is, is a collection of glorious finds from the past that just don’t fit my needs at present.”

At Carter’s storage unit in Litchfield County, Connecticut, you immediately notice a few things. First, there are no newspapers. Second, “unit” doesn’t begin to do justice to the Quonset hut-sized hangar, which is clean enough to pass a white-glove test. And finally, though taste and discernment can be two very different things, Carter possesses both in spades. One gathers that he’s held onto the title “editor” for so long precisely because he’s able to extend the job description to all areas of his life.

“You go through taste periods. I probably had 20 French doors, and I thought... ‘I’m not going to be needing them anymore.’ We just auctioned them all off,” he says. In other words, as much as the man knows how to collect, he also knows how to cut.

RIGHT A SAMPLING OF OBJECTS COLLECTED OVER THE DECADES. OPPOSITE IN THE DINING ROOM, A CEILING LIGHT BY SERGE MOUILLE HANGS ABOVE A VINTAGE SWEDISH TABLE AND CHAIRS BY NIELS OTTO MØLLER.