Inside Shonda Rhimes’s Posh New York Apartment | Open Door | Architectural Digest

hey a.d i'm shonda rhimes welcome to my home come on in [Music] this entryway is one of my favorite rooms in the house amazingly enough just for you would be an entryway one for the light fixtures which are you know there's these great little wall fixtures but also the ceiling fixture which this is just like my favorite work of art unto itself it is so amazing you can look at it all day long so beautiful i don't know where michael smith found this piece but when he did i i literally i'm not joking i wept because i thought it was so amazing and then i filled the space with my favorite paintings by hughie lee smith who by now you all are think i'm probably huey lee smith stalker and i am and i don't care because his work is so incredible you want to feel welcomed and and like you're coming into a home when you come into a space and so i wanted my favorite things about me when i walked in [Music] this is my favorite place to be whenever i'm in new york city it really is like one of the comfiest coziest places in the world it's not a huge apartment it is big for new york standards but it's you know not like a big sprawled out place so it's pretty cozy there's only a few rooms and so the rooms have to do double duty so this room is my living room my entertaining space and it's also my office when i bought this place i didn't have any furniture for this place at all i'm not like a person who has like a ton of extra furniture so when i bought this place i started with the wallpaper and built outwards from there but i had to acquire every single piece that you see here it was sort of every piece was a find which probably goes with the eclectic nature of it all i don't know if you've ever had to like sort of start from scratch for something but it's really hard to put together a space which is a why it's nice to have a really great designer like michael smith helping you but b why it's good to be open and feel like once you pick something that you're obsessed with that you can be open about how else you put together a room if you look at all the pillows none of these pillows seem like they match but they all do once you put them all together they form a palette that really goes with the wallpaper and pulls the whole room together i chose pieces mostly for comfort and for simplicity but also it made it possible to choose things that could be both antique and modern and feel a little bit eclectic and i could also just sort of go crazy with something like this but not feel like i had to stick to anyone's style instead i let the wallpaper really be the choice for the room and let everything else sort of complement it which was exciting for me i don't know if you look up in any of the rooms all the light fixtures are really special and this is one of those light fixtures it is sort of very grand and very bold but it's also you know crystal glass makes it so that it doesn't take over the room but it does make a statement and i really love that it made a statement so it's one of my favorite pieces [Music] my favorite place to sit honestly is in that little chair by the orange tree i sit there with my laptop and i write and i can sit there for hours and hours and hours a day the sunlight pours in that window and i sit there and i get a ton of writing done just sitting in that chair it's odd because you know usually i'm very specific about the comfyness of the chair and where the chair has to be there's something about that spot at that desk in that chair i can write there for hours a day it's very comfortable and i spend a lot of time sitting right here because the sunlight is beautiful and doing a lot of thinking this is one of my favorite paintings in my other house i have a lot of paintings by huey lee smith and so this is another one of the hugely smith paintings that i have and i don't know i like to stare at it it always makes me think of endless possibility so i love to look at that why don't you come with me and we'll show you my other favorite room which is the dining room [Music] so the dining room also does double duty it is obviously a dining room there's a big bang cat that sits in the corner cabinet full books over there two of my favorite paintings by walter williams are in here you can also turn this into a guest room so even though it's a dining room it also does triple duty as like a library a guest room a place to sit and read and write what's great about this space is it also if you shut all the doors to this room this area right here which looks like a television set pulls down and it is a bed which is actually a great idea because there's a full bathroom right around the corner and you can bring a guest here and a guest can stay here and feel completely cozy and comfortable and like they have a private space so it's another way of like using a room for more than one function and once again wallpaper i really went a little crazy with wallpaper in this room and had to really trust michael smith my designer when he said like let's go with this like super interesting wallpaper i didn't know immediately that i was gonna love it but the minute it went up on the wall i was obsessed with it the texture of it the way it comes together it's so beautiful and it makes this room feel so specific and so different and like you're stepping into a whole other world here's another light fixture that's completely different from the one that was in the other room but it fits this room perfectly and i think there's elements of each room that feel like they they they sort of needed to be here you know the banquette needed to be here in order to make this room fit all the functions that we wanted it to have we needed to be able to get a big dining room table in here but we also needed to be able to get a bed in here the coziness of this sort of created the need for the kind of wallpaper that we put on the wall and the color palette that we chose to make something that felt sort of inviting and warm and dark i have had the fire on when i've thrown a dinner party and it does make for a really wonderful feeling in space this room really does work well for dinner party i mean i've had people come and sit for hours bottles and bottles of wine are gone through and there's something about the way this room feels that makes people feel like it's just an open invitation and i love that because i'm not a person who i as i was i don't know i'm sort of famous for having like a little bit of social anxiety and for some reason this room sort of takes it all away for me and for anybody who comes here they come and they want to sit and they want to be here and it makes it so much fun now why don't you come and see my kitchen [Music] so here's my kitchen which is completely kind of redone from what was originally here this space used to be both i think a kitchen and then like also a maid's room and then there was also like a little laundry room off to the side and we closed it in and made it more of a real space for cooking and being and then my favorite thing that we did to give it more space was we created these cabinets that are glass on both sides to go in front of the windows which i'd never done before and i'd never i was a little bit nervous about and it turns out to be such a great idea because it gives you extra storage but it also lets all the light flow in also once again it's about wallpaper so in here this is sort of this really funky floral wallpaper that i thought was really great and i think when used in moderation looks amazing in this room and really grabs the light and grabs the ceiling which is also this great buttery yellow oddly enough i have noticed every time i have a kitchen i have it in this color palette i think it's something about it makes me feel comfortable in terms of cooking and eating and i was at my mom's house the other day and i realized that my mom's kitchen is this color so maybe it's about my childhood there's something about my childhood in this color that make me feel comfortable and like i'm at home or something it just brings me back to like being in my mom's kitchen and watching her cook having a big island in this kitchen was one of the things that felt important i mean it's not a big kitchen so you want to find a way to make this kitchen feel inviting and you want to find a way to make this kitchen feel like the counter space is substantial enough that a lot of people can be in here and what's happened is sometimes is if i'm having a dinner party or if i'm having people over i can make this a buffet and people will come in and get all their food off of this counter and then take it out into the dining room and sit down to eat or like my kids and i will sit around this counter and we'll eat breakfast or something like that which is also really nice but it does give you the space you need to spread out and like get the cooking done or get the serving done that you want to have done the light fixtures in here are these mirrored fixtures that do push like downwards because if you notice this is not the most sun filled space in the space this might be the darkest room in the whole apartment but it is a way of bringing light in just like having the glass front cabinets you bring the light in and you push the light down and it does fill the place with a sense of light and it makes it feel pretty good in here i love to drink coffee in here in the morning [Music] i do a lot of cooking in this kitchen surprisingly i'm a big fan of italian cooking so i mean and maybe i'm a little basic but i'm a very big fan of you know like pastas and lasagnas and risottos and things like that and so i try really hard to make them and i'm still perfecting my recipes i wouldn't say i'm the world's greatest cook but i am getting pretty good [Music] so this room is i call it the guest room but in reality it's just my girl's room they love it they take turns like deciding who gets to have this big bed the masks on the wall make them feel like they're sort of in their own like little like play space even though it's still a little bit formal my daughter always takes her blanket and turns this bed into sort of her own little tent my youngest daughter my oldest daughter loves it because it feels very grown up for her so it sort of fits everybody when they're in here which i love and so it doesn't have to feel like anybody's particular like this one's mine this one's mine room once again it has this very beautiful artistic light fixture the whimsy of the blue i think it's really beautiful you know the blue in here feels very warm and inviting but also can be sophisticated which i thought was really nice and once again we chose wallpaper because the wallpaper was you know very sort of soothing and brings you in i didn't want it to feel too kid-like you know my girls are growing up fast so you know i have a child who goes from you know last year she was very into fairies and this year like she would rather die than talk about fairies so i wanted the room to grow with them as they grow and feel like a space that they can become more sophisticated in and also you have a daughter who's in college across town and i wanted her to be able to come here and feel like she had a place to like hunker down if she ever wanted to have a place to hunker down so it does double duty that way when you're looking this way you see these incredible masks on the wall and they're just so beautiful i mean they're childlike but they're also very very mature and i thought that they were really interesting they sort of captured the idea that this was a room that was going to grow from being a room for little kids to a room for sort of tweens to teen girls as we move through time and i wanted them to have that element for themselves and i love them i think that they're sort of fanciful and and but also very sophisticated sophisticated version of what like animal masks for kids would be the earth tones on the wall like take the blues and and take the whimsy out of it all which i think is really lovely then it also grabs the colors in the chair to grab the colors in the wall to grab the colors here it sort of pulls everything all together which is really nice at the moment this is curated but they do have their own personal elements that they've stuck in the drawers and their the closet is filled with their clothes and you know they they have their they called you know they have their city things um which i love because i i'm dying to have you know kids who want to live in the city and be cosmopolitan city kids and yet i have country children at the moment so we're working on it [Music] okay a.d thank you so much for coming to visit me in my home i am so glad that you came but i have to say goodbye now because i have so much work to do to get back to i have scripts to finish and if i didn't finish those scripts you wouldn't have anything to watch on television i don't think so i have to say goodbye now and tell you to scoot but hopefully i'll see you all again soon and maybe you'll be welcome to come back again next time so take care

Channel: Architectural Digest

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Id: aB7JCNRI3rY

Length: 13min 34sec (814 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 03 2022