Location, Location, Location is a new column from CULTURED that explores the dynamic and creative histories behind properties on the market. From a starchitect’s Upper East Side apartment to a farmhouse where a novelist completed her magnum opus, Location, Location, Location lets you peek inside storied spaces before they get scooped up.
The late starchitect Robert A.M. Stern was known for many things—from his 18-year run as dean of the Yale School of Architecture to the firm he founded, RAMSA, which designed everything from Ivy League buildings to coveted New York condo towers like 15 Central Park West.
Now that the apartment—where he spent the final two decades of his life—is on the market (listed at $4.5 million), a less expected side of the history-loving, bow-tie-wearing architect comes into view—one that was edgier, experimental, even a little punk. “We did black rubber drapes and a red rubber bed skirt and all kinds of fun, weird details,” says Fawn Galli, a former assistant in Stern’s office who helped decorate his two-bedroom apartment in the Chatham, an Upper East Side brick-and-limestone building of his own design.
Today, Galli runs her own New York-based interiors firm. But when she met the celebrated architect in the 1990s, she was a self-described club kid—fetching fabric samples by day, dancing atop tables at Jackie 60 and the Tunnel by night. “I had no training,” she says. “I was a professional pencil sharpener.”
She did have an innate talent for design, though, and plenty of chutzpah. When she heard that Stern was buying a loft apartment in New Haven, near his new job at Yale, she decided the project should be hers. “At the time, he was getting bad press,” she recalls. “The students thought he would be stodgy—someone who would teach them how to build a French chateau in New Jersey.”
At that point, she had seen enough of his work to suspect that, despite his reputation for classicism, his home could be something far more adventurous—funky, personal, and a little irreverent. She secretly worked on a proposal, then stationed herself outside the office kitchen until he appeared to get a cup of coffee. “Then I pounced,” she says. “I said, ‘Bob, I think I should do your apartment in New Haven.’ And he said, ‘Do you, now?’ I told him I had made him a lookbook, and he told me to meet him in his office in five minutes. The next morning, one of the partners walked by and told me, ‘Bob wants you to do it.’”
RAMSA partner Michael Jones remembers it this way: “Fawn came out of left field. She was new in the office but was bold and had a vision. She pushed him outside the box to do something creative. Bob loved it.”
Galli and Stern plotted floor plans over martinis and oysters at Balthazar and hunted for furnishings together, snagging a “ton of furniture by Jean Prouvé when it was still affordable,” she says. She discovered a roll of wallpaper by the artist Roy Lichtenstein in his rental apartment and mounted it “as a shape floating on a wall.”
The success of the New Haven loft cemented both a friendship and a creative partnership. When Stern was ready to buy his first Manhattan home in 2001, he again turned to Galli. He had his choice of apartments at the Chatham and selected a two-bedroom residence with 11-foot ceilings and windows in three directions. The terrace overlooked one of Manhattan’s hidden gems: the Jones Wood Gardens, a 1920s shared courtyard tucked behind a dozen historic brownstones. (Imagine Gramercy Park, but invisible from the street and accessible to only a handful of people.) “I wanted to look right through the apartment into the trees,” he told Architectural Digest in 2002.
Stern also envisioned a New York home that resonated with the cinematic glamour of Manhattan. A devoted movie buff, he counted The Thin Man among his favorites. “He fell in love with the movies, with Fred Astaire and Art Deco,” Galli says. “He always had a wonderful romance with New York City.”
Inspired by the work of the modernist designer and architect Eileen Gray, Galli designed a pearl-gray sofa for the living room and a color-blocked glass screen for the dining area. The pair traveled together to Paris, shipping back crates of flea-market finds, from an Alvar Aalto table to a circa-1970 Gae Aulenti lamp.
They painted the floors ebony black, creating a dramatic backdrop for some of Stern’s favorite possessions: a 1920s Mason & Hamlin baby grand on which he occasionally played Cole Porter and George Gershwin, an old Mies van der Rohe table, and artwork collected over a lifetime, from a John Chamberlain sculpture to a monumental Donald Judd wall piece in wood and galvanized metal. (A similar Judd work sold for $14.2 million at Christie’s this past spring—more than triple the apartment’s list price.)
The condo is currently listed by broker John Burger at Brown Harris Stevens. While Galli is saddened to see the home she created for her mentor on the market, it brings her pleasure to know he lived there happily until his death last year. As unlikely as their partnership might have seemed, it spoke to Stern’s curiosity, generosity, and instinct for recognizing talent. “He believed in me,” Galli says, “before I believed in myself.”
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