While most people are thinking about spending their Memorial Day at the beach or at a back-yard barbecue, Valarie D’Elia is going on a 400-mile driving tour of the Southern states affected by the recent BP oil spill.
“I’ll be assessing the impact on tourism . . . so I’ll be able to tell New Yorkers what they can expect,” says D’Elia. “It’s also a way to support the region.”
That’s just par for the course for this intrepid travel reporter, who’s hosted the popular NY1 segment “Travel with Val” for the past 12 years. Building on her brand, D’Elia revealed her revamped Web site (called travelwithval.com, natch) two weeks ago, where she posts additional stories and videos along with an expanded “D’Elia’s Deals” and an “Ask Val” section.
The site is run out of her spacious home office, which she converted from a second bedroom in her 1,000-square-foot Upper East Side co-op, where she lives with her Havanese dog, Mojito. After $50,000 worth of renovations on the postwar apartment, which she purchased six years ago for $410,000, it’s now exactly how she wants it — well, almost.
“It looked like a maze before, and now I love the open layout, but I wish that I had made the office bigger and the kitchen [next to it] smaller,” says D’Elia, a petite brunette who has a soft spot for Italian fare, but who rarely cooks at home. “I also probably shouldn’t have chosen the tiles I did for the floor — there are too many crannies in them to be in a kitchen — but I saw tiles like this in Italy and wanted them.”
As you might expect, D’Elia’s travels have shaped much of her design and décor choices. She had the bathroom modeled after one she had seen at a Ritz-Carlton hotel, and a new tub put in as well. “I travel around the world and always see amazing tubs,” she says. “I couldn’t go longer, but I did get a deeper one. It’s one of my favorite things: taking a bath while looking out at the moon through the window.”
An ornate silk rug in the living room was found on a trip to Turkey, and much of the art on the walls “are things I’ve picked up along the way on my travels,” D’Elia says. (She also hunts the consignment shops of her native Connecticut for antiques, where she found the table, chairs and ornate chandelier in the dining room area.)
But it’s in her office — the walls lined with framed prints of historic ocean liners — that D’Elia’s globe-trotting roots become clear.
“I come from a travel agency family. My great-grandfather started the business in 1902,” she says, pointing to an original framed flyer for F. D’Elia & Son, of Bridgeport, Conn., which offered transatlantic steamship passenger services. “They sold steerage-class tickets,” she explains, opening a scrapbook to show tickets dating from 1915.
It’s just one of the many pieces of memorabilia that she’s saved from her family’s travels. They include a menu from the ill-fated ship Andrea Doria (it sank in 1956 off Nantucket), a photo of D’Elia with her brothers and parents about to board a flight on the now-defunct Trans Caribbean Airways and sailor dolls that she got as a girl aboard cruise ships, including the Queen Mary. “The Queen Mary was my favorite ship,” she says. “It was such a glamorous way to travel.” (She also adores its new incarnation, the QM2.)
Of course, D’Elia’s life may sound very glamorous — she was packing for a cruise to Bermuda when we spoke with her — but it’s also a lot of work.
“I’m on the road about 60 percent of the time,” she says. “Then I get home and I have to put together the story: look at the video that was shot, write the script and edit footage. I’m lucky that I can do a lot more on my laptop now than I used to.”
(She usually takes just one vacation a year, with her boyfriend, Ron, to someplace in the Caribbean.)
When D’Elia isn’t working, she’s taking Mojito to the dog run at Carl Schurz Park or the Barking Dog restaurant on 94th Street. Or, she’s simply enjoying the views from her 27th-floor corner unit: The bedroom, bathroom and kitchen all offer panoramic vistas of the East River and the RFK, Throgs Neck and Whitestone bridges, while the office and living room look south along First Avenue.
“What I like most about the view,” she says, “is that it showcases all the transportation options that a travel reporter could ask for . . . boats and ferries sailing up the East River, cars tied up in traffic along the FDR Drive, Amtrak chugging along the railroad trestle bridge and flights taking off from LGA and JFK.”
Whatever the mode of transport, we wanted to know the best tip this travel maven could offer readers.
“Pack light, forget the blow-dryer — who wants to worry about all that stuff?” she says. “You’ll be amazed at how liberated you’ll feel!”
Valarie D’Elia’s favorite things
* Her family’s travel-related memorabilia
* The atlas globe from her childhood
* The views of the East River and beyond
* A shrine in her bedroom that immortalizes her beloved late pets