Given what we know about Anthropologie—the store that sells a $9K tent and stages all of its catalogue photos in vibrant, half-destroyed rooms—it's only natural that the Greenwich village townhouse of Keith Johnson, who spent 18 years as its buyer and head of home design, should be a boho-chich Elysium. Johnson oversaw the renovation and furnishing of the home, a five-story building he bought in 2012 with his partner of 40-some-odd years Glen Senk, the former CEO of Anthropologie's parent company, Urban Outfitters, Inc., who now runs the David Yurman jewelry empire. Reflecting to Harper's Bazaar on the huge walk-in closet that connects their bedroom to the living room-like-master bathroom, Senk allowed that the place is "kind of the gay couple's ultimate fantasy town house."
You want elegantly curated vintage finds? Lucian Freud's Head of an Irishman hangs on the mantle of the sitting room (pictured above), which is flanked on one side with "one of the house's crown jewels," a mirror-gilded Art Deco bar. On the other end is a formal-looking library, with a "towering bookcase, and walls polished to a deep, decadent gloss." The crumbled, utterly pomo footstool and pixelated chair are there because Johnson likes how "artist-made furniture can make you look with new eyes at antique pieces in a room."
Meanwhile, the foyer (pictured below) hosts Stable, a video work by Kathleen Herbert that shows horses exploring England's Gloucester Cathedral (Senk keeps six and rides them competitively; they have names like Ryan and Jake, for Ryan Reynolds and Jake Gyllenhaal) as well as terra-cotta sculptures of a dog and a fox that were once part of the roof of an Irish country house. For more from Johnson and Senk on how their home became an "unofficial showroom", make your way to Harper's Bazaar.
· Manhattan's Chicest Urban Retreat [Harper's Bazaar]
· All Printed Page posts [Curbed National]
· All Keith Johnson coverage [Racked NY]