The years had taken their toll on the parlor of the 1892 Upper West Side brownstone of Tony Award-winning actress Judith Ivey. The decorative woodwork on the ceiling had started to disintegrate. Some of it was chipped; other sections had completely broken off.
Ivey decided to make the repairs herself. She got out a ladder, balanced herself nearly 18 feet above the floor and painstakingly started fixing the woodwork.
“It was broken in so many places,” she says. “I restored it all by hand. I was up there for days.”
That was just one of many tasks Ivey and her husband, cable TV producer Tom Braine, undertook to bring their home back to its original glory. They hired contractors for some work, but much of it was done by Ivey and Braine themselves.
“That’s what I like to do,” Ivey says. “A project like this — it’s endless. I can work on it all the time.”
When she’s not busy working, that is. Currently, Ivey is starring in the Roundabout Theatre Company’s “The Glass Menagerie.” (For her role as the fierce Amanda, a single mom during the depression, Ivey was just nominated for a Lucille Lortel Award for best actress.) Her career also includes TV (“Nurse Jackie”) and film (“Flags of Our Fathers”), and she is reading plays with the hope of directing next year.
Maybe Ivey should consider writing, too; the story of her brownstone is a doozy.
It all began in 1978. Ivey had yet to meet her future husband when he rented an apartment in the six-story townhouse. In 1980, it went co-op and he bought his space, which took up half a floor. In 1989, he and Ivey married and moved to California. But they hung on to the apartment.
In 1996, the couple returned to NYC and bought another unit on the same floor. They now had a whole floor, “but having been spoiled by living in a six-bedroom California house, it was still cramped,” Ivey says. “We read an article that said the biggest bang for your buck was to take over brownstones that had been turned into separate units and restore them back. So that’s what we started doing.”
They bought unit by unit. By 2000, they had all of them. All, that is, but one.
“We had one holdout,” Ivey says. “A woman who still lives in half the [third] floor. It’s a rent-controlled apartment, and we never asked her to leave.”
So they ended up with an almost single-family home, 6,500 square feet with five bedrooms, seven bathrooms, six fireplaces, a dining room, a sitting room, a parlor, two offices, a sewing room, a dressing room, a library/TV room and two computer rooms for their 20-year-old daughter, Maggie, and 16-year-old son, Tom.
Ivey and Braine have been working for the past 10 years to get the residence back to its original splendor, and it’s still very much a work in progress.
“We’ve been restoring it piecemeal,” Ivey says. “We’d close up part of the house, restore that and put everything back, and then go on to another part.”
One big job was the magnificent stairway, once covered in an ugly black walnut stain. They had craftsmen strip down the staircases, the entry hall and the banisters. It turned out that it was all made of Cuban mahogany, a wood so beautiful that it’s called the “wood of kings.”
The couple restored wooden window shutters, brass fireplace surrounds, pocket doors and doors with stained-glass transoms. They polished the building’s original fireplace tiles, put in new floors in the building’s original pattern and winnowed down the garden, which Ivey says was “like a jungle.”
For Ivey, the results have been “like a dream come true. I’ve had many dreams come true.”
Like getting to play Amanda in “The Glass Menagerie,” which she’d wanted to do since she was 18. (“I knew that someday I had to play this part. The years ticked by until I reached the right age.”) And getting married, becoming a mom and living in a brownstone.
“When I first moved to New York in 1978, I visited a friend who lived in one,” Ivey says. “I decided then that was what I wanted. Years later, I met my husband and he actually lived in a brownstone. And that was when all my dreams came true.”