Open the door, look up and there they are: birds darting, preening, gazing down, cartwheeling, looking around. Hudson Valley birds, mind you; very specific breeds. All were painted by a Dutch artist, Peter Korver. One is a red-tailed hawk, favourite of the home owner’s ‘hippie sister’. ‘You can only see the tail, really, but that’s fine,’ he says, referring to the hawk’s inclusion within the faux-coffered ceiling mural, which greets visitors to his Manhattan apartment. It’s a reminder of his other home – in addition to this 1930s Carlyle-hotel flat, he owns a retreat on the river, where he can enjoy the real thing as it swoops by.
Everything he has acquired over the decades has a story. Underpinning it all is a long partnership with the interior decorator Thomas Jayne, a relaxed classicist, who came into the collector’s life some 30 years ago when the woman who would become his wife needed help with her place. ‘Her budget was too small, but Thomas just rolled up his sleeves anyway and started moving furniture around.’ He and his team later did a town house for the couple, the country place and a residence on Fire Island. The marriage did not last but the association with Jayne continued. This time around, the tall, scholarly and drily funny interior decorator oversaw the bachelor flat, but put one of his more catholic colleagues, William Cullum, largely in charge. Cullum, whose Instagram notes his love of ‘pattern, glitter and the 19th century’, noodled the beamed ceiling in the gallery, after spotting the artist on the internet. He then worked with the painter, Jayne and the owner to personalise the avian results.
‘William brought in more complicated things, and I am more architectural,’ says Jayne, a Parish-Hadley Associates alumnus, of his strength-accentuating working relationship with Cullum. He compares their joint approach to that firm’s era-defining founders, Sister Parish and Albert Hadley, the former a rock-ribbed traditionalist who needed a structural eye to clarify her chintz and rag rugs, the latter more respectful of history, but at heart a mix-master Modernist. Recently out on his own, Cullum adds: ‘It’s not academic but we both love historical blogs.’ So does the client, who now works with Cullum. About to turn 60, he desired all aspects of his past and new lives brought together into a decorative scheme that Jayne describes as symbiotic. ‘New beginnings, youth, old age, troubled life, sadness,’ the owner adds, ‘healing and integrating, disintegrating and illogical. Everything.’
Consider, for example, a puzzling, but personally eloquent, combination in the living room. There, overlooking the distant boughs of Central Park – ‘We call this place the Schooner,’ the owner says – an antique oval table with a Jayne provenance. The funky silvered ceramic lamp, shaped like a drunken mushroom, is a Cullum suggestion. A gathering of paintings is part connoisseurship and part confidential: one is a quirky 19th-century depiction of a boy feeding chickens; another, even smaller abstract in shades of grey and blue came via one of the owner’s college girlfriends. Elsewhere are works by Frank Stella, Donald Judd and Lucio Fontana; on one of the inlaid chests stands a 12th- or 13th-century Korean statue of a multi-headed goddess. ‘Great decoration is like collage,’ says Cullum, pointing out objects that should not go together but happily co-exist, from Egyptian Revival painted stools that once belonged to Ann Getty (WoI Sept 2022) to a glamorous Herter Bros table (which Jayne and the client acquired in the 1990s) to vintage John Saladino chairs (Cullum acquisitions) that have been glowed up with custom embroidery (again, Cullum). Even the chimney piece has been faux-stoned for effect. ‘It has a coolness about it, a private-club ethos but one that’s youthful,’ Cullum says. Jayne chimes in: ‘Fine objects well placed and comfortable furniture.’
Ancestral bits are scattered here and there: an old-master portrait in the dining room, a folding screen that a grandmother picked up in Japan in the 1950s stretched across a striped wall of the gallery. Despite the talents involved, the owner has incorporated touches of his own and continues to do so, such as the Melissa McGill video installation in the gallery, discreetly tucked beneath a rough-hewn side table, and a painting in the dining room that depicts a harem scene at grand scale and with a certain lasciviousness. It originally belonged to a British duchess, a racy sort who spent some time in prison. It was displayed in the living room, until it was not and made its way down a hall to the current space. ‘I bought it as a wedding present for my former wife,’ the owner reports. ‘But after three years, my wife said: “You must get rid of it. It’s sexist.” So it spent 25 years in my mother’s living room.’ Out back is a small spare room dressed with a polychrome flowered print, even the ceiling. (That is the space I would commandeer, but the owner should not consider this my attempt at an invitation.) Another spare room, better in terms of formality and spaciousness, wears shimmering pale-blue silk and contains 1940s ribbon-backed chairs made by Grosfeld House.
The dining room is dark, with just two slim windows, looking out on to a barren lightwell. It remains dark, with only strategic pools of illumination, just enough to prevent one tripping over the Oriental carpet. Cullum applied deep-red cork flecked with metallic foil to the walls, increasing the sound-proof gloom while adding subtle reflections and, almost absurdly but brilliantly, had the mouldings finished lilac blue. The spouse-offending Frederick Goodall painting, an 1880s work entitled Pets of the Harem, in which a diaphanously clad woman toys with a monkey and ignores a scarlet ibis, fills one wall and is framed in enlivening giltwood. The narrow table is dark too and became the centrepiece of a Bertie Wooster-themed house-warming. ‘Even the menu was developed out of a PG Wodehouse novel, The Code of the Woosters.’ The owner had always wanted to throw such a party, and Cullum and Jayne gave him a reason – and a laid-back place – to do just that.
Thomas Jayne. Visit jaynedesignstudio.com or ring 001 212 838 9080
William Cullum. Visit williamcullum.com
A version of this article appears in the July 2026 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers. Sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter, and be the first to receive exclusive stories like this one, direct to your inbox
