‘D
84 house garden september 2019o we have the garlic?
The anchovy paste?
What about the
dijon mustard?’
bellows a voice
from the kitchen.
a chorus of ‘check!
check! check!’
echoes back. It’s
4pm on a Tuesday,
and cooking class is under way for four-year-old gracie
durrett and a half dozen of her friends. The five-metre-
long calacatta gold kitchen island is prepped with all
the ingredients for a caesar salad, and the junior chefs
are just about to add the Worcestershire sauce when
sylvana Ward durrett – matriarch of the house and
cofounder of us-based children’s e-commerce boutique
Maisonette – sweeps down the stairs and motions
for me to join her one flight up on the parlour floor.
‘It’s mayhem down there,’ she says, leading me into
the decidedly more grown-up living room, where she
sinks into a mustard-velvet sofa perched atop a graphic
striped rug.
gracie and my son are schoolmates, so the scene of
a gaggle of kids in her roost – whether for a birthday
party or a Maisonette photo shoot (the home serves
as a recurring backdrop for the site’s campaigns) – is
in fact a familiar one. The first time I laid eyes on the
residence was through a picture my babysitter sent me
of my son, gracie and another girl donning swimsuits
in the master bath’s freestanding tub for one such shoot.
sylvana claims she hadn’t even hatched the business
idea when they started designing the home, but she
admits, ‘it works out well.’
she and her investor husband started house-hunting
in Brooklyn shortly after the birth of their son, henry,
seven years ago. at the time, they were living in a
shoebox apartment in greenwich Village. ‘henry’s
nursery was basically a closet,’ she says. When the new
parents received an invitation to visit some friends in
cobble hill, they trudged across the bridge and fell
in love. Weekend treks to open houses (baby henry
in tow) and multiple lost bidding wars would ensue
before they happened upon a classical 1901 brownstone
with gracious proportions and an 18-metre-long garden.
They clinched it, embarked on a gut renovation and,
at the tail end of 2017, moved in. By that time, their
family had expanded to six: henry being joined by sisters
gracie and Millie, now two, as well as a one-year-old
Labrador called Blue, which happens to be sylvana’s
favourite colour.
sylvana wanted a space that would lend itself well to
family living while being formal enough for entertaining
on a grand scale. after planning nine Met galas while
she was the director of special projects at Vogue, ‘my
dream was to have a place where I would actually use
my work at home in a meaningful way.’pendanTs by The
urban elecTric
co. hang over The
calacaTTa gold
marble-Topped
kiTchen island.
on The cabineTry
is farrow & ball’s
‘casTle gray’ painT.
sinks and fiTTings
are by rohl; chairs
by jayson home