AD | Athena Calderone Takes Manhattan

Athena Calderone gets excited about parchment. She’s big on silver leaf, and crazy for etched glass; niches are ongoing fixations, and figured stone is always a yes. In her last kitchen, she worked at a massive, nearly seven-foot-square island of Calacatta Paonazzo marble—ravishing, until she set her sights on something better. Now she has a monolith of dusky red Kinnekulle limestone to keep her company in the kitchen.

“I never thought I would get into hardware design,” she says, glancing from her new countertop over to the burnished-nickel pulls on the double doors leading into her new living room. “But with that and everything else, I just felt like I was going to take this moment to expand myself in ways I’d never dreamed of.”

That’s saying something, because Calderone dreams big. The focus of her latest aspiration is the Manhattan apartment that she and her husband, Victor, a music producer and DJ, bought in 2023. After decades in Brooklyn, most recently in a much-emulated Greek Revival town house (AD, November 2018) where she nurtured a design business and the lifestyle site EyeSwoon, published two books, authored furniture and rug collections, and generally modeled an ideal life, she was ready for a change. (The New York Times titled its article on her move, “What Happens When You Get So Influential That You’re Bored by Your Own Aesthetic?”).

Photography by: William Jess Laird