Great Expectations

To make a long story short, the NYtimes last Sunday had a great article on one particular apartment in the otherwise banal Peter Cooper Village in NYC. The images were pure visual eye candy for me. The interiors of this apartment remind me of the surreal and very green set design of the 1998 film, Great Expectations. I love all the ivy creeping inside, the Gaudi/art nouveau floral motifs and the choreography of old antiques with his own random creations. It's all just so fantastic! Here's an excerpt, enjoy...

The Steamfitter’s Escape

"THERE are 11,232 parquet-floored apartments in Peter Cooper Village and its sister complex, Stuyvesant Town, east of First Avenue, all built in the 1940s as affordable housing for middle-income tenants, and all remarkably similar in style and layout. Or almost all, anyway: one stands out for its stained-glass windows, its wall of vines and its spiral staircase to nowhere. Step inside, and you’ll never think of mirrors on the ceiling the same way again. His Way Lenny Weiner outfitted his living room with a fake fireplace, a mirrored wall painted with the New York skyline and a staircase that has fooled neighbors into thinking he has a duplex.

Lenny Weiner, the retired union steamfitter and former Golden Gloves welterweight champion who lives there, isn’t afraid of a little glitter, or even a lot of it. He has pressed red plastic gems into the tufts of his forest-green leather couch and covered the wall behind it with rhinestones. Decorative moldings coated with iridescent white paint frame ceilings and doorways. A chandelier in the shape of a giant star, which Mr. Weiner pieced together with strands of crystals from lighting shops on the Bowery, dangles from the ceiling near deep-green faux-tin tiles. A few feet away, a circular mirror on the ceiling above the spiral staircase creates the illusion of a second story.(Todd Heisler, NYTimes)"