The Parlor: The first room you enter off the street was covered in cedar and big pink floor tiles with a popcorn ceiling, “but the minute I walked into the house,” Vivian Reiss says, “this was the room that caught my imagination.” The paintings are hers, and she restored the architectural details.
Photo: Annie Schlechter
The circa-1850 townhouse looks conventional enough from the street. But once through the doors, you’re in Vivian Reiss’s world. One room is painted ballet-slipper pink, and all the walls are hung with her big colorful paintings. Reiss says, “I had this idea of a Gustavian color palette,” meaning the late-18th–century Swedish décor popular during the reigns of Gustav III and IV. “Not that it had anything really to do with the house. But that’s what I thought. There is a lot of pink in the house, which might seem kind of yuck, but it’s not.”
Just beyond that pink room is the hallway with a giant marble basin and fountain from India — the floor had to be reinforced with steel to bear its weight. The hallway also has an ironwork staircase leading upstairs and a stair opposite going down to the kitchen. The dining room is clad in the original wood paneling and has a built-in sideboard. Her dining table, Reiss points out, “is in the shape of a roast chicken. So here are the drumsticks, and that’s the tail, the neck, and the wings.” Designed by Reiss, it sits in front of a fireplace large enough to walk into. And the room is lined with paintings, including one she made of her daughter, Ariel Garten, based on a work in Buffalo’s AKG Art Museum called The Marvelous Sauce featuring a cardinal cooking. “Hence the red jumpsuit Ariel is wearing depicted in my old kitchen,” says Reiss.
Reiss grew up in a rental apartment on 86th Street and Riverside Drive. Her parents had come to New York from Budapest in 1947. “Everyone in my family sounds like Zsa Zsa Gabor,” she says. She attended Hunter College High School, went on to study ballet, and has been painting for as long as she remembers. She married a Canadian and moved to Toronto for 36 years. When, as Reiss puts it, she “de-married,” she decided to move back to New York.
Reiss wanted a brownstone. The one she bought, in Murray Hill, was once home to a member of Herman Melville’s family and, later, a candy magnate. By the 1970s, the house was sold to a group of hippies, and it remained in one of their families until Reiss bought it at an estate sale in 2017. “It was completely bizarre, filled with things that you would think were hip in the ’70s, like a pinball machine in the kitchen,” says Reiss. Many of the floors were covered in pink tile.
Reiss has redone it herself, with the help of artisans, room by room. She repurposed parts of the mantel in her bedroom as decorative elements around the door to the dining room. “I have to do things in a challenging way,” she says. The craftsperson who did the work on her kitchen learned how to make Mexican pool tiles into mosaics for the primary bathroom.
In the basement, Reiss had the floor of the kitchen dug out three and a half feet to gain height for the ceiling. She wanted the room to open to the garden in the back, which has a salvaged ironwork fence. The trellis was made from Victorian moldings that had been cut in half. The outdoor table has a marble top repurposed from a shower wall in the house.
The kitchen island is covered in a collage of color photographs taken by Reiss of the produce she grew and the dishes she cooked in Toronto. All the pictures in the kitchen are food and cooking themed. She painted the front of the fridge with trompe l’oeil food. “I was thinking, I am not a neat person. You don’t want to look inside my refrigerator, but wouldn’t it be great if you had the illusion of looking inside?”
The Library: The custom sofas are covered in Pierre Frey fabric. The painting of irises above the fireplace is by Reiss, and the hanging spherical light fixture is a Moooi knockoff.
Photo: Annie Schlechter
The Dining Room: “The red lip chair from an art-supply store I bought eons ago,” Reiss says. The painting is of her daughter. The wood paneling and built-in sideboard are original.
Photo: Annie Schlechter
The Main Bathroom: “I love paisley, so I knew I wanted a paisley-shaped tub,” says Reiss. The Bouloum lounge chair is by Olivier Mourgue. The Mexican pool tiles are mixed in with objects she scavenged from different decorative elements in the house. “I also endlessly bought little mirror tiles on Amazon.”
Photo: Annie Schlechter
The Kitchen: Reiss painted over the front of the refrigerator. The oversize teapot on top was bought in Palm Beach. “The little red one,” she says, “is the first kitchen thing I bought at West Townhouse in the ’60s. It was an early concept store.”
Photo: Photo: Annie Schlechter
The View to the Garden: The Murano-glass chandelier was found at the Brimfield market in Massachusetts; the round chandelier is also Murano, from the ’60s, and was found on Chairish. The pink painted wall was designed by Reiss to hide a stairway to the garden’s second level.
Photo: Annie Schlechter
Reiss’s studio is on the top floor of the brownstone.
Photo: Annie Schlechter
A view of the parlor-floor hallway from the dining room toward the pink room with the 1900 ironwork railing on the right and the stairs leading to the kitchen on the left. “The hanging lamp I got at an auction from the estate of Robert de Forest, the president of the Met for 17 years,” Reiss says. “I believe it was designed by his brother Lockwood de Forest.”
Photo: Annie Schlechter
The primary bathroom includes a room with another combination of custom Mexican pool tiles made into mosaics. “One of my favorite color combinations is pink and navy,” Reiss says. “This is a Turkish marble sink from a hammam, from about 1850.” The striped wall is painted.
Photo: Annie Schlechter
Reiss in her garden.
Photo: Annie Schlechter
