A very formal dining room features ancestors’ portraits (a great-great-great-great-grandfather and a great-great-great-great aunt) and family silver. There’s also an antique table Fales-Hill bought in LA, 18th-century chairs (a wedding gift from Diahann Carroll) and a chandelier that reminds her of her mom’s earrings.
(Elizabeth Lippman)
The room of daughter Josephine Bristol, 9, has chandeliers that look like hot air balloons. “I like what they say to a child about reaching for the heavens,” Fales-Hill says.
(Elizabeth Lippman)
Author Susan Fales-Hill is a woman with truly discriminating tastes. So, in 1997, when she and her husband, Aaron Hill, were looking for an apartment, she knew exactly what she wanted.
First, it had to have an Edwardian or Victorian feeling.
Second, it had to be big enough to both start a family and house her huge wardrobe.
Third, it would be ideal if it could be on the Upper West Side, where she’d lived throughout her childhood.
After looking for about six months, she found almost everything she’d wanted in a 1908 Edwardian building. The only problem was that it wasn’t on the West Side — it was on Park Avenue.
But it did have a history: The building was one of the first apartment houses on Park Avenue.
“It has lovely touches,” Fales-Hill says, “like high ceilings, working fireplaces and glass doors on the attended elevators. It just makes me feel like I have my own little ‘Downton Abbey.’ I think the old-fashioned feel of the place was what attracted me. My tastes tend to run 150 years before my birth.”
Fales-Hill had a successful career in television — she was a writer for “The Cosby Show” and the head writer/producer for “A Different World,” among other shows. So, she and her banker husband pooled all their money to pay for the apartment. “All our money,” she says. “Everything.”
That bought them a classic seven of 2,000 square feet with 10-foot ceilings, three bedrooms, three full bathrooms, a maid’s room and a formal dining room. “It was very important to me to have a separate dining room,” says Fales-Hill, who has dinner there with her family almost every night and also enjoys entertaining. “Our dining room has pocket doors, and I think that’s very Old World and charming.”
Fales-Hill is the daughter of Haitian Broadway star Josephine Premice (among her shows: “Jamaica” and “A Hand Is on the Gate”) and a patrician stockbroker, Timothy Fales, whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower. Her apartment is filled with memorabilia from both sides — family silver, antiques, hand-beaded vintage evening bags, ancestors’ portraits, tiny silver slippers her mother collected and tons of photographs. “These are my treasures,” she says.
And there are books — books all over the place. She herself is the author of “Always Wear Joy,” a memoir of her mother, and the novel “One Flight Up.” Her most recent book, “Imperfect Bliss,” is a laugh-out-loud contemporary spin on “Pride and Prejudice.”
Her life isn’t all about letters, though. Fales-Hill loves to luxuriate in the pleasures of her apartment. “It’s a refuge,” she says. “I don’t have a lot of things, but what I have brings back a lot of memories. I’m surrounded by the most joyous parts of my childhood and family history.”
Still, she does have aspirations for a different kind of home in the future. She’s 50 now and plans to kick aside all this gentility and return to the more chaotic Upper West Side when she’s older.
“I’d like to die on the West Side,” Fales-Hill says with a big smile. “I want to be an old lady at Zabar’s with my walker knocking people out of the way.”
Prop styling: Don Sumada/BA-Reps.
Makeup: Joey Mills.