As he often does with clients, Volpe took Seller and Lehrer shopping early on in the design process to gauge their tastes and begin shaping their relationships with rooms that, at least for the foreseeable future, would remain abstractions. Eventually, Volpe explains, “when the pieces they bought are installed, it’s ‘Oh, I know you!’ ” This bit of world-building wasn’t lost on the couple. Among their favorite acquisitions are a pair of 1961 lounge chairs by Gustave Gautier in the living room and an important Eugène Printz cabinet, circa 1930, that opens to reveal drawers for a gentleman’s shirts and silk handkerchiefs. It now sits gloriously unencumbered in the entry hall. An adjacent table, by the Hungarian master craftsman Mathieu Matégot, required a midnight phone call between the designer (in London) and his clients (in New York) to secure—Volpe had sprinted through the opening night of the PAD design fair to land it. “We hadn’t even worked out the complete architecture of the space yet, but I was so sure it was the right piece,” he exults.
Spurred on by their designer, Seller and Lehrer turned the inevitable construction delays into opportunities for connoisseurship. Collecting design, Seller says, “has expanded our horizons. Because we’re now art history students. We’ve been learning, what is modernism and how is that reflected in furniture?”
They’d already gotten a similar education in contemporary painting through Yvonne Force Villareal, their art-world Circe of more than two decades. Over the years, the curator had turned them on to a choice subset of artists, among them Lisa Yuskavage, Chris Ofili, Hernan Bas, and Jack Pierson. More recently, she says, they’ve been able to access their “dream list,” buying works by Agnes Martin, David Hockney, and Jasper Johns.
At nearly 10,000 square feet, the town house has proved greedy for art and furniture in enough quantity to fill its palatial public spaces—though Seller keeps insisting he lives between the bedroom and the kitchen.