Spotted recently over at Daily Candy: a slew of rich detail shots gleaned from the home of design maverick Iris Apfel, yes, the bespectacled (self-proclaimed) "geriatric starlet" whose penchant for layering baubles and mixing design tropes landed her—in 2005, at 84-years-old—an exhibition at the Met aptly titled Rara Avis (Rare Bird). Her three-bedroom Manhattan apartment is what you may expect from an interiors devotee (she helped renovate the White House for nine presidents) who founded her career on her aptitude for "scavenging junkyards and flea markets [for] the kinds of furniture and fabrics that were hard to come by in wartime," as Architectural Digest once wrote in a feature. Inside: parrot candlesticks, piles of tasseled pillows, a bronze dog on its hind legs holding mail, 18th-century Sicilian chairs—plus the world in feathers, florals, and antiquities ("I don't care whether pieces are expensive or junk").
"We would go to Europe for fabrics and I would buy things. My clients liked offbeat things, and I used to ship at least two 40-foot containers a year back to New York. When that all stopped I still had the in at the flea markets, but my husband said we had no space in the warehouse. I told him jewelry doesn't take up too much room, but little did we know."
The complete set of photos, over at Daily Candy.
· An afternoon with Iris Apfel [Daily Candy]
· Iris Apfel's Exuberant Manhattan Apartment [Architectural Digest]
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