MAGICAL PROPORTIONS AND THE UNIOUE

NEIGHBOURHOOD OF SUTTON PLACE DREW CURATOR ANDREW BOLTON AND FASHION DESIGNER THOM BROWNE TO ACQUIRE THIS TOWNHOUSE ON MANHATTAN'S EAST SIDE.

- MITCHELL OWENS

What do Elsie de Wolfe, Renzo Mongiardino, Harrison Cultra, Georgina Fairholme, and David Kleinberg have in common? Yes, all are interior decorators of signal influence, but more importantly, they all lavished their expertise on the self-same house. The red-brick beauty on Manhattan's far East Side that architect Mott Schmidt created in the early 1920s for Anne Vanderbilt, a moneyed widow who was giving up her late husband's Fifth Avenue castle for something a bit less egotistical and a lot more elegant.

"The proportions are so magical-that's what seduced us," says Andrew Bolton, Wendy Yu curator in charge of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (and, with Anna Wintour, one of the forces behind the annual Met Gala). He and his partner, Thom Browne, the fashion star who was recently named the next chairman of the CFDA (Council of Fashion Designers of America) and who made headlines in 2018 when the Ermenegildo Zegna Group acquired 85 percent of his namesake brand in a deal that valued the company at $500 million, encountered the residence while house-hunting a couple of years ago.

They initially had Greenwich Village in their real estate sights, but they kept being drawn back to Sutton Place. "It's one of the most special neighbourhoods in the city," Bolton continues, and, arguably, the house that he and Browne now own is its most alluring. The 70-foot-wide facade may seem well-mannered and spatially economical-the house is just one room deep-but the architecture has a distinctive spirit that Browne describes as "a dominant persona, and we were perfectly happy submitting to that and doing what the house wanted".