In what could almost be described as a Zen koan, designer and author Ellie Cullman looks out the living room window of her graceful Park Avenue duplex and says, “Either you want to have the sky or you want to have the trees, but you don’t want to be in the middle looking at concrete.”
The apartment occupies the second and third floors, which means that Cullman has those trees — along with plenty of what she calls “Park Avenue light,” which is particularly clear, she explains, because the boulevard is so wide. The 14-room duplex, completed in 1929 by the renowned architect Rosario Candela, became home to Cullman, her husband Edgar Cullman, Jr., and their three children in 1986.
A couple of years before, Cullman had started her design partnership with the late Hedi Kravis in what must have been one of the most serendipitous beginnings of any interior design career. Back then, they were attempting to write a screenplay together about Hedi’s divorce from financier Henry Kravis. It included such detailed descriptions of interiors that the producer rejected the script — and instead hired them to rescue his own home from a series of failed design attempts.
“And by then,” says Cullman, “we were also known for going to people’s houses for dinner and re-arranging the furniture after a couple of glasses of wine. It was our party game.”
The “party game” quite quickly turned into the blue-chip interior design firm Cullman & Kravis. The firm was initially known for meticulous specialization in English and American antiques, in part because Cullman, who studied art and art history, had previously worked as a curator. Clients like Oprah Winfrey and Candice Bergen began to call.
“I think we were much more perfectionist when we started — we had rules and you had to follow the rules,” says Cullman. But over the past several years, she says she’s loosened up — both on client projects and on the second renovation of her own apartment in 2005. “We like to have what I call ‘the curveball’ — something like a piece of contemporary art that can completely change the personality of a fairly classical room.”
In her own home, the revitalization included the hanging of exciting modern works by artists ranging from Kenneth Noland to Willem de Kooning, while a modern palette of paint colors like peacock blues and pale “Swedish” green infused rooms with energy. Because their three, now-grown children (Trip, a theater director; Sam, a filmmaker and Georgina, who has a doctorate in environmental science) had moved out, one of the apartment’s five bedrooms was turned into a second study. Today, there are now studies for both Cullman and her husband, who’s principal in a family equity firm.
A second bedroom evolved into a guest room, while a third bedroom became what Cullman jokes is her “Imelda” dressing room. Or it would be if Imelda Marcos had an equal gift for layering careful aesthetic detail upon careful aesthetic detail. This same principle of close attention to tiny traits provides the theme of Cullman’s latest book “The Detailed Interior,” which came out yesterday from the Monacelli Press. Although each featured interior is full of sophisticated detail, the homes range widely — from a working ranch in Colorado, to Oprah Winfrey’s Hawaii retreat. In the latter, a stylistic motif of two of Oprah’s passions — dogs and horses — connects the property’s myriad rooms.
Such signature subtlety is evident in Cullman’s own Park Avenue apartment. Instead of plain-painted walls, for instance, painted surfaces are overlaid with glazes or waxed to create a gauzy, softer texture; hand-stitched decorative panels on curtains are precisely placed so that the intricate work is not lost in the folds; bookcase shelves slot into barely-visible sawtooth ledges to avoid the usual hole-and-peg design because, she insists, “holes are ugly.”
For this degree of quiet perfection, Cullman credits her life-changing stay in Japan in the early 1970s. “It saved me! I wasn’t so interested in aesthetics before I got to Japan. They manage to make an art form of the most commonplace elements of your life.” While living there, she studied Japanese, flower arranging and the tea ceremony. In almost every room of her apartment, Chinese and Japanese art and antiques blend seamlessly with European furniture. In the dining room, the 18th-century Chinese wallpaper depicting village scenes creates a fascinating visual dialogue with the modern paintings, which in turn contrast with a collection of American works on paper.
And then there’s the very American candy: shiny, foil-covered chocolate eggs in the living room and neon-bright jellybeans in the library. Cullman, whose family owns Peter Luger, the famed Brooklyn steakhouse, grew up with bowls of candy around the house. “I thought it was strange when I went to other people’s houses and they didn’t have candy.” She smiles and shrugs. “I just like having candy in a room. It makes me happy.”