Tour Designer John Derian’s Apartment of Wonderful Things
The Living Room: Much of the furniture is from John Derian’s own line, which is inspired by antiques. “The biggest sofa in the room is the Cove — that was an 18th-century sofa I found when I did my collection with Cisco Brothers,” Derian says. “It has a really nice deep seat, and it’s not that long, but I can still take naps on it.” The palette above the fireplace is by Peter Gee. “He passed away in 2005 and was popular in the ’70s. I bought three, then Andy Spade bought the third; I kept the other two.”
Photo: Stephen Kent Johnson
I think I was a melancholy baby,” design impresario John Derian says of his childhood growing up in Watertown, Massachusetts, the youngest of six. “I always made forts and moved things around everywhere. I had a place in the backyard, in the tree, under the porch, in the bushes. Wherever I could find a place to create, I did.”
Now all grown up, he has a kind of fort in this penthouse with a wraparound terrace and wood-burning fireplace on lower Fifth Avenue, which he bought in February 2020, right before the pandemic hit. “So for one whole year, I just used it outside and took advantage of it and really had fun,” he says.
He still hasn’t quite gotten around to thoroughly renovating away the mistakes that a previous owner had made. “This thing, which killed me — it’s just a closet that doesn’t need to be here,” Derian says, pointing to the addition that runs along one side of the living room. “It ruins the whole shape of the room, and I was thinking I could never live here with this thing because I would never have a room that made sense.”
But it turns out the closet serves no structural purpose, and it will go — eventually. “This will be a perfectly 12-by-12-square-foot room when it’s done,” he says. In the meantime, “there are lots of distractions; I am just covering it with things.” The apartment is his autobiography in objects.
One of those items is a very real-looking papier-mâché pigeon poking out from a hole in the wall of that misbegotten closet. That bird, made by artist Nancy Lee Carter, is part of the menagerie of art and furniture based on 18th- and 19th-century antiques (“Sort of updated for today’s-sized person,” he says), along with fragrance, textiles, rugs, ornaments, découpage, and myriad iterations of tabletop pieces, that Derian sells in his three side-by-side storefronts on 2nd Street in the East Village. His shops and his apartment share the same fairy-tale, out-of-time aesthetic dating back to when he started making trees out of buttons and shells for a flower shop in Boston in 1985. After his button topiaries, he started making decoupage — plates, paperweights, and more — and moved to New York in 1992.
“Nothing was ever planned,” Derian says. He had “no intention of having a store, ever.” Nonetheless, he’s sold things at more than 500 retailers around the world and still has those three East Village shops as well as an outpost in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he also has a home.
This year alone saw the launch of his second coffee-table book — Picture Book II — collaborations with the Metropolitan Museum and Target, a new line of table linens with Summerill & Bishop, and Delft-inspired ceramics with Astier de Villatte.
This is the first apartment he has owned in the city. He lived on the Lower East Side for 20 years before renting two different apartments on 2nd Street, the last above one of his shops. “It was beautiful, but I didn’t want to be above the store; I couldn’t escape work.”
Escaping work, however, has never really been an option. As Adam Moss wrote of Derian in his book, The Work of Art, “He lives what he sells.” And he sells what he lives. But more often than not, he just finds something interesting somewhere — it can be in a flea market in Paris or growing on the side of his house — and sees beauty in it. Take the tangle of roots hanging from the ceiling in the middle of the living room. “In Provincetown, we had this beautiful clematis that grew on the side deck and then something happened and it died after 15 years, so I just stuck it in a bag and took it back home and I just stuck it in here.”
The Window Seat: “The mercury ball I got from my friend Tim Callis, my gardener in Provincetown; it has a magical quality,” says Derian. The primitive bentwood chair on the left was found in the south of France. “I got the marble-top table in the Paris flea market; it’s early 1800s. The wing chair is called the Butterfly Chair. I got that from Gary Ford. I have gotten a bunch of great things from him.”
Photo: Stephen Kent Johnson
The Living Room: “The little sofa, I got that in Paris at the flea market,” Derian says. “It’s 19th century. The portrait painting on the mirror is 18th century, and I got it in the south of France, and the one on the left is by Marion Pooke. She was an American painter who lived in Paris in the ’20s, and that is from 1911.” The mirrors are from the lobby of the Society Hill Playhouse in Philadelphia. Derian plans to remove the closet, left, to make the room square.
Photo: Stephen Kent Johnson
Photo: Stephen Kent Johnson
The Kitchen Table: “This I have had for years,” Derian says of the Swedish school desk. “I thought, It has to fit in the apartment somewhere, and I just stuck it here. The chair with the very low back — I got a pair of those in the Paris flea market; they are almost modern to me. I like the shape.”
Photo: Stephen Kent Johnson
Portrait of John: “The telephone is from Janet West,” which he bought at the flea market on 25th Street near Sixth Avenue in New York. “It’s probably from the 1940s, but that metal ringer is so good,” Derian says.
Photo: Stephen Kent Johnson
The Bedroom: The 19th-century four-poster bed is from Acushnet River Antiques in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Derian found its canopy hanging in the Paris flea market. “It might be a wedding train; it’s embroidered with tassels.” The 18th-century Chinese hand-painted wallpaper panel was found in Hudson, “before Hudson exploded,” according to Derian. He did a wallpaper collaboration based on the pattern with the French firm Pierre Frey. The cat is from his collaboration with Target in 2020.
Photo: Stephen Kent Johnson
Bathroom Shelves: The marble finger is Roman, 2,000 years old. “The apothecary jars are both 18th-century, French. I bought them in a French auction house.”
Photo: Stephen Kent Johnson
The Terrace: The pair of chaise longues are from Belgium. “I got them for my house in Provincetown in 2007, so they have been outside for almost 20 years.”
Photo: Stephen Kent Johnson
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