PRESENT AND ACCOUNTED FOR: A portrait of Adriana Trigiani’s daughter, Lucia, hangs over the fireplace in the dining room.
TALK OF THE TOWNHOUSE: Writer Adriana Trigiani’s two-bedroom residence in the West Village includes a private 500- square-foot garden. (Photo by Elizabeth Lippman)
Trigiani’s dining room, which is full of prewar details and overlooks the garden, features a Cath Kidston-designed chair. (Photo by Elizabeth Lippman)
One of Trigiani’s favorite things is a Murano fruit chandelier in Lucia’s room— the only modern light fixture in the townhouse. “A chandelier is the jewelry of your room,” Trigiani says. (Photo by Elizabeth Lippman)
Life was almost perfect for novelist Adriana Trigiani. It was 1996, and she was living in New York City, where she’d wanted to make her home ever since she could remember. An idea for a screenplay was brewing (it would later turn into the best-selling novel “Big Stone Gap”). And she was very happily married.
But there was one thing that could have made everything better — owning a home.
Trigiani and her husband, Tim Stephenson (the lighting designer for “Late Show with David Letterman”), were renting two floors of a four-story, 1838 townhouse in the West Village, but they really wanted to own the whole house.
“We asked the owners, a doctor and his wife who we love, what they wanted for the house,” Trigiani says, “and when they told us, we said, ‘Oh, we’ll never be able to afford that.’ And then they did the most beautiful — the most magical — thing. They said, ‘You save up. And when you’re ready, that will still be the price.’ ”
It took some time to save up.
Trigiani had been part of a comedy troupe called the Outcasts from her college days in Indiana through 1988, after she had moved to New York. (“I wasn’t too good,” she says, “but I was persistent.”) Then in 1989, she started writing for the sitcom “A Different World.” She became a writer/producer for “The Cosby Show” in 1991 and worked there through its finale in 1992.
By 1996, she was primarily focused on writing novels.
Finally, in 2002, the couple had saved enough money, and the house became theirs. Trigiani won’t reveal how much they paid but knows she got a deal. “The doctor wanted us to have it,” Trigiani says, “because he knew we would take care of it. We really honored the bones of the building. Down to the littlest detail — even the paint. We’ve kept the same colors he had when we repainted. So it was one family giving it to another.
“I lived in a very old house in Big Stone Gap, Va., so I learned how to be in an old house. It’s a different way of life. We look at it like we’re passing through. This is where we’re raising our daughter [10-year-old Lucia]. And then another family will come in and have a ball with it and so it will go.”
But, for now, Trigiani and Stephenson occupy the bottom two floors of the house and rent the top two to a friend, TV producer/director/writer Michael Patrick King of “Sex and the City” fame. The entire house is 4,200 square feet; each of the two-level apartments measures 2,100 square feet and has 15-foot ceilings throughout.
Trigiani and Stephenson’s apartment has two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a dining room and a 500-square-foot private garden. And the couple has kept all the original architectural details — the hardwood floors, the arched doorways, the beautiful woodwork and the marble fireplaces (there are four, but the one in Lucia’s room is boarded up for safety reasons). All the light fixtures are from the era electricity was invented, and the dining-room chandelier predates even that: It was originally gas-lit and later was converted to electric.
“The eat-in kitchen in the house was originally in the bottom floor right off the street,” Trigiani says. “But we changed things around. We eat in the dining room, and I cook in a small kitchen on the second floor. I wish I had a big kitchen and a big office, but I have neither. Thank God my imagination is portable. I write in the yard a lot.
“In the master bath, there’s a door that leads right into the yard. So winter, spring, summer, I open that door when I’m bathing and I get the fresh air. And no one can see me.”
When it came time to decorate, Trigiani was ready. “Even when I couldn’t afford it, I put rooms together on paper,” she says. “I always knew someday I’d have this.”
Now she has a custom-made Roubini rug, two Louis XIV side chairs, a couch that was recently re-covered in a patterned Scalamandre silk and two 1930s club chairs with claw feet in her living room. There’s an Early American pedestal table with antique chairs in the dining room, which overlooks the garden. And both the living and dining rooms have black and white window treatments Trigiani calls an “homage to Cecil Beaton” (a tribute to his designs in “My Fair Lady”) that she lined in gingham because “gingham makes me happy.”
And then there are books — all over the place.
“I’m a collector,” Trigiani says. “Everywhere I go on book tours, I pick things up. I collect as many signed books as I possibly can. I find most of them in secondhand stores.”
She also collects art. Nothing very expensive but things that strike her fancy, including a portrait of Lucia by painter Vivian Moody that hangs over the fireplace in the dining room. Several other paintings were done by Lucia herself.
“You can put anything in a beautiful frame and it looks like museum- quality,” Trigiani says. “ I have a mirror — 13 feet high by 5 feet wide — that came from the Baroque Room at the Plaza hotel. It’s so big and heavy that it had to be bolted to the wall. I can never remove it. So whoever gets this house next will also get the mirror.”
She paid $2,000 for it, but she says it cost more to move it to her apartment, where it now hangs in the entrance hall, (which also has wallpaper that looks like quill pens “because this is a writer’s house”). “Of course,” Trigiani adds, “there are always two prices with me. The price that’s real and the price I tell my husband.”
Another treasure is her complete collection of Enrico Caruso records. That’s partly because Caruso figures prominently in her latest best seller, “The Shoemaker’s Wife.”
Because the book was inspired by Trigiani’s grandparents’ love story, the publisher has included a section of vintage family photographs in the paperback version, which went on sale this week.
Trigiani has written 14 books, and “Shoemaker” is her fourth (after “Big Stone Gap,” “Lucia, Lucia,” and “Very Valentine”) to go into development for possible movies.
She’s also editing “Ciao, Valentine,” the finale of a popular three-book series about an Italian shoemaking family. The book will come out in early 2013.
Trigiani also takes readers on walking and tasting tours of both Greenwich Village and Italy so they can retrace her characters’ steps in her various books. And she has a online gift shop (adrianatrigiani.com) run by her sister, Antonia.
“In everything I do,” Trigiani says, “home and family are always the theme. It’s always about getting the house and holding on to the house. This is what matters to me. I’m so happy living here. I don’t really require much more.”
ADRIANA TRIGIANI’S
FAVORITE THINGS
* A photo of Trigiani’s mother in 1956
* A painting Lucia did when she was 5, her version of van Gogh’s “Sunflowers”
* A plaster replica of a palazzo in Venice called Ca’ d’oro. “I bought this becausemy grandmother had a postcard from 1947 of Ca’ d’oro,” Trigiani says.
* A mini bride and groom from the top of her grandmother’s wedding cake
* Apainting of Lucia by portrait artist Vivian Moody
* Trigiani’s collection of signed books, which include books by President Obama, Dinah Shore, Bette Davis, Lauren Bacall, Julia Child and her husband, Paul
* Photos of her with her father and her husband on her 1994 wedding day
* A Murano fruit chandelier in Lucia’s room— the only modern light fixture in the townhouse. “A chandelier is the jewelry of your room,” Trigiani says.