Issue link: http://papercitymagazine.uberflip.com/i/1547304
Opposite page: Custom Bennison fabric draperies frame hand-painted de Gournay wallpaper, with a collection of botanicals and a giltwood mirror. This page, clockwise from left: John B. Murray designed a pendentive dome for the powder room. P.E. Guerin gilded fittings. Kincaid inset the dome with small antique mirrors that catch reflections of the powder room's details, including a blue vase atop a carved plaster shelf. Penn & Fletcher embroidered the border of the Roman shade in the powder room. The walls are stenciled in the same flower-and-leaf pattern. the wife says. "I like the layering. It makes everything very individual. That's how you put your stamp on it." Nowhere do all those skilled hands come together more brilliantly than in the dining room — the apartment's showstopper, inspired by a woman who knew how to make an entrance. Fleur Cowles, the legendary editor of Flair, the lavish magazine of the early 1950s, lived at the Albany in Mayfair, where she commissioned Federico Pallavicini — a decorative artist, theater-set designer, and Flair's art director — to paint a mural of stylized vases behind her sofa. Kincaid spotted Cowles' room in the book How They Decorated and carried the picture with her for years, waiting for the right project and the right client. She found both at 960 Fifth Avenue, where Cowles' room lives on, reimagined. De Gournay's panels of oversized vases — some striped, others patterned like porcelain — brim with white blossoms and fronds against a shimmering gilded ground. It's a glamorous salon, elegant enough for a formal dinner and cozy enough for game day with the couple's grown children. The furnishings are a well-traveled mix of antiques and pieces with provenance. A Syrian mirror and wall brackets hang above an Adam-style