I LOVE NICE THINGS.

Mortimer has a line of handbags and clothing in , for which she was featured in an advertising campaign. She also features prominently in Samantha Thavasa USA's online promotional materials and in the company's store, which also carries her handbags. She subsequently formed her own clothing line, Riccime by Tinsley Mortimer, which is available in select stores in Japan, including Isetan. In 2008 Mortimer became involved in branding and design for condominium development.

 A nine room penthouse duplex on the Plaza's northwest corner that truly lives like a "house in the sky". Accessed by a 45 foot entry foyer with both sweeping circular staircase and private elevator, this classic home offers up to four bedrooms plus a library. The living room, formal dining room and spacious kitchen with breakfast area all face north toward Central Park, while a handsome library enjoys western views and a wood-burning fireplace. Upstairs, a 350 square foot gallery space leads via French doors to a 22 foot park view terrace. The enormous corner master bedroom suite, also with wood-burning fireplace, offers dual bath and dressing accommodations and a second private terrace high above the park. Ample guest and/or children's rooms enjoy sun-flooded exposures to the south. Unique among the Plaza Private Residences, Penthouse 2001 combines the characteristics of a traditional prewar duplex with contemporary design elements to reflect a lifestyle that is, at...

  23 Gramercy Park South  last year for $18.5 million. The buyers of the 27-foot-wide landmark were Colombian heir Andrés Santo Domingo and his wife, socialite and  Vogue  contributor Lauren Santo Domingo. Apparently they weren't completely satisfied with their purchase, because the house is about to undergo a serious renovation.

In a stroke of architectural chutzpah Mister West hired genius Italian architect Claudio Silvestrin to do over the interiors. The result is a sculptural, elegant and austere space wrapped in French limestone and pear wood that's absolutely stunning to look although, admittedly, not so easy to imagine cluttered with the detritus of everyday life. The 1 bedroom and 1.5 pooper apartment–at least we think it's got 1.5 poopers–has a continuous and interrupted flow from the long, gently curving entrance hall to the seamless integration between kitchen an living room and then into the bedroom area that is flanked by a large dressing room and a monolithic, trough-like limestone sink. The windows are covered in floor to ceiling shades through which filtered light creates a soft shadow pattern that plays beautifully against the rigorous geometry of the interior architecture. This interplay of soft light and shadow combined with the warm, organic quality of the materials–the limestone an...

t doesn’t take long to see why Daphne Guinness has earned her reputation as the fashion person’s fashion person. On a December afternoon at the Carlyle hotel in Manhattan, she floats into the tearoom atop towering custom Christian Louboutin platform wedges and dressed in a gray wool sheath of her own design that clings to her delicate frame. A birdlike, ethereal creature, she wears a simple but splendid antique diamond brooch, her upturned blond mane adorned with her signature black skunk streak. Settling into a banquette, she sets down her capacious Hermès bag and summons a formerly invisible waiter, from whom she orders a pot of Lapsang souchong and a Red Bull. Informed the hotel doesn’t carry the high-octane beverage, she whispers for the concierge, who promptly dispatches a bellman to fetch it. Little in Guinness’s life has been ordinary. The daughter of Irish brewing heir Jonathan Guinness, Lord Moyne, and French beauty Suzanne Lisney—and granddaughter of Diana Mitford, the celebr...

The woman in question, everyone quickly learned, was Suzanne Saperstein, the Swedish-born chatelaine of Fleur de Lys, one of Los Angeles’s most extravagant homes. Although Saperstein, a former model and competitive skier, was no newcomer to Paris (she’s been a dedicated couture client since the Nineties), she had been mostly absent in recent seasons as she weathered a bitter divorce from her husband of 21 years, Texas billionaire David Saperstein. Among the jaded onlookers at the shows, Saperstein’s fashion-victim ensembles and 33-year-old boyfriend (former pro soccer player Christopher Roselli) sparked a range of comments, some kinder than others. But any critiques from the crowd were mild in comparison to the torpedoes Saperstein fires at herself a few weeks later, over lunch at the Polo Lounge in Beverly Hills. As she amusingly mocks her physical imperfections, her taste in clothes and her tendency to get bloated during transatlantic flights, Saperstein confesses to a self-doubt tha...

       

A seminal work of Modernist architecture, Lever House redefined not only Park Avenue and corporate architecture, but also much of urban planning. This "small" building, by midtown Manhattan standards, not only forswore utilizing its maximum buildable size, but it also sacrificed its extremely valuable ground-floor space for public purposes. While its catty-corner neighbor, the Seagram Building, was widely credited a few years later with spurring the movement for plazas, Lever House actually was the real pioneer. Its design appears to be a paradigm of clean lines and simplicity, but in reality it is quite sophisticated. A tower slab placed near the north end of the site "floats" above a "floating" platform raised on stilts, or pilotis. A large rectangular well is cut into the platform to create an open courtyard. An employee terrace overlooks the lushly landscaped courtyard whose large planting area is surrounded by a continuous seating wall. Stainless-...

“Billy Baldwin had a tremendous influence on me,” Mica Ertegün says of the pioneering midcentury interior designer. Ertegün, who cofounded her New York firm, MAC II, with the late Chessy Rayner in 1967, traces the earliest incarnation of her simple, “though not minimalist,” style to Baldwin. She describes his work as “very clean-looking, not cluttered, with very straight lines,” lacking the fussiness of his era and instead being far more modern than anything else happening at the time. These days, when seeking inspiration for her own clean-lined and understated interiors, which she fills with a rigorously chosen assortment of art and antiques, the Romanian-born designer and her staff of 11 turn to myriad sources. Mica Ertegün 212-249-4466 Although she eschews trends, believing instead “that the basic taste never changes,” Ertegün does keep an eye on recent developments in the field. She often finds that new products, be they wall finishes or building materials, can shape her vision on...