Inside the 30-room party penthouse of Condé Nast
And I speak with the designer Michael Smith about having Condé's legendary ballroom wallpaper in his own NYC apartment!
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When I first moved to New York, it was my dream to work at a Condé Nast magazine. Thirteen years later, my goals may have changed, but my interest in Condé Nast hasn’t—partially because Condé, the man, created one of the most impressive apartments in New York City history.
Let me set the scene: 30 Rooms, a glazed terrace, and a fabulous ballroom (!) clad in 18th-century Chinese wallpaper, all designed by the incomparable Elsie de Wolfe. What else would you expect of the publisher of Vogue and Vanity Fair? The brightest minds in the city would clamor to get invited to the parties at the centerpiece of Manhattan’s café culture: Condé Nast’s palatial penthouse at 1040 Park Avenue.
Yes, Condé Nast was a real person!
Before the famous magazine publishing house, there was the man himself, Condé Nast, born at the height of the Gilded Age. In 1909, he purchased Vogue, then a relatively obscure fashion publication, which he catapulted into the spotlight alongside Vanity Fair and House & Garden to form the backbone of his eponymous company.
Nast became known for throwing exceptionally lavish parties with a tightly ruled guest list. The one through line? Everyone was a leading figure in society, culture, and the arts.
By the mid-1920s, Condé Nast was enjoying the height of his success, and he needed a new home to match. He was already living at 470 Park Avenue, and he just had to look a few blocks north to East 86th Street, where a new apartment house was under construction.
The Building: 1040 Park Avenue
1040 Park Avenue, on the corner of East 86th Street, was completed in 1925 by leading architects Delano & Aldrich. Each floor originally housed three apartments of 8, 11, and 12 rooms. An early sales advertisement for the building touted 8-room apartments costing $17,600 and 12-rooms $49,0001—absolutely wild considering how a two-bedroom at 1040 Park Ave is in contract for $2.25M right now.
There would’ve never been a penthouse apartment if not for Condé Nast. Like many other co-ops, the top floor of the 14-story building was intended for staff rooms, which could be purchased as extra space for the apartments below.
Condé Nast, like Marjorie Merriweather Post before him, envisioned a bespoke apartment in the new building. While construction was still underway, he proposed reconfiguring the top floor with its wraparound terrace into an entertainer’s dream and combining it with the 12-room corner apartment below to form a 30-room, 5,100-square-foot duplex2—one of the first, and largest, penthouses in the city3.
The Penthouse
Nast hired legendary interior decorator Elsie de Wolfe4, who furnished the apartment in her signature light and airy French style.
No floorplan exists, a frustratingly common occurrence with custom apartments, but what I’ve pieced together from various accounts suggests that bedrooms were on the lower floor and 10 entertaining rooms—along with the staff quarters—were upstairs, which included salon, dining room, library, drawing room, and terrace.
The centerpiece of the apartment was undoubtedly the 23-foot by 43-foot ballroom covered in Chinese Qianlong wallpaper which was taken from the now demolished English country house Beaudesert. The antique 18th-century paper featured a colorful and imaginative scene of birds and flowers weaving through a garden wall.
The duplex got its other defining feature—the glazed terrace—a few years after Nast moved in. He contacted the greenhouse manufacturers Hitchings and Company to enclose the south-facing terrace overlooking East 86th Street in iron and glass so that parties could spill “outdoors” even in the colder months5.
“Many prominent in artistic and literary life dance in Condé Nast’s new home” reported The New York Times after Nast’s housewarming bash in January 1925. The guest list was an assortment of bright young things that included Fred Astaire, Arthur Hammerstein, the inventor Rube Goldberg, and Edward Steichen, a favorite photographer of Vanity Fair, among others in the theatrical and creative worlds.
Nast threw bi-monthly parties at the duplex, and invites were as hand picked as Ward McAllister’s Four Hundred:
The guests were carefully selected from those A, B, and C lists: the A-list, carefully curated names from society; on the B, people in the arts. The C was a catchall for every manner of contemporary celebrity—all broken down further into married couples and the unattached.6
Café society flowed through the ballroom and terrace—which also hosted magazine photo shoots—for nearly two decades until he passed away in 1942. His funeral was hosted, where else, but in the duplex.
After Nast’s death, Elsie de Wolfe’s furnishings were auctioned off, and the apartment was subdivided, with the lower floor cut off and the upper entertaining spaces broken into various apartments7. This was a common if not unfortunate fate of Manhattan’s largest prewar apartments to accommodate changing tastes and lifestyles in a post-war city.
The glazed terrace still remains, although that, too, has been subdivided between apartments. As Christopher Gray observed in 2000, its slanted glass roof was exchanged for a flat concrete slab to prevent leaks.
Every so often, a fragment of the apartment will come up for sale—in 2005, a 1-bedroom carved from the ballroom was offered for $775,000—but it’s unlikely the legendary duplex could ever be reassembled.
But not all has been lost. Perhaps the most iconic remnant of the penthouse—the 18th-century ballroom wallpaper—was serendipitously rediscovered after being lost for about 60 years.
“I always loved that wallpaper since I saw it in a book about Elsie de Wolfe,” the interior designer Michael Smith told me one day over the phone while he was boarding a flight back from London. “I loved its architectural elements, so I went to Gracie and asked them if they would ever make me a version.”
The response was entirely unexpected. It turns out that when Condé Nast’s apartment was broken up in the 1950s, the precious ballroom wallpaper was saved and housed in Gracie’s archives all along. “They said you’ll never believe this, but we actually have the original wallpaper. Do you want to buy it?” Michael remembered.
“They had only enough to do a small space, which could fit perfectly in my little New York dining room,” Michael felt it was a bit of design kismet. “It’s extraordinarily beautiful.” Michael arranges for it to be touched up and conserved every few years to guard against cracking and flaking.
Gracie has since gone on to produce the wallpaper itself—just in case you, too, want to recreate a bit of the ballroom—but Michael says that the age of the true Elsie de Wolfe relic makes the paper unlike anything that can be bought today. “The 18th-century paper as a specific weight and texture that sort of forbids you from putting anything else on it. The wallpaper has its own unique dimensionality. It’s the only decoration in the dining room!”
Michael got another unexpected surprise when, shortly after the apartment was photographed, someone came along to directly connect him to the wallpaper’s past.
“Condé Nast’s granddaughter—who was still alive—reached out to me. She wanted to come and see the wallpaper,” Michael said. “It was so lovely, and when she arrived, she gave me a photograph of herself playing the piano in the ballroom with the wallpaper in the background. It was a great moment that made the original apartment come alive again.”
A FEW MORE THINGS
I’ve been kinda obsessed with Sirens on Netflix. Anyone else?
Nothing like finding original floors under entryway tile to make you want to restore all the floors in your house! I’m working on a newsletter for paid subscribers about what we’re doing with the floors in our Finger Lakes house post-flood.
So, so tempting. Liz McGowan, the Williams College Art History professor who always encouraged me to keep writing, is retiring! She’s the best, and I hope she has many wonderful trips to Greece in her future.
Sobs.
Christopher Gray, “Streetscapes/1040 Park Avenue at 86th Street; When Condé Nast's Duplex Penthouse Was the Talk of the Town,” The New York Times, November 5, 2000, https://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/05/realestate/streetscapes-1040-park-avenue-86th-street-when-conde-nast-s-duplex-penthouse-was.html.
While the 30-room apartment is often touted as the “first penthouse,” there were others, like Marjorie Merriweather Post’s 54-room triplex, that were also complete by the time Nast moved in.
Elsie de Wolfe deserves her own newsletter. American interior design as a profession would not be what it is today without this queer icon.
Gray, “Streetscapes/1040 Park Avenue.”
Susan Ronald, Condé Nast: The Man and His Empire (New York: St. Martin’s Publishing Group, 2019), excerpted in Avenue Magazine, https://avenuemagazine.com/conde-nast-parties-1040-park-avenue-cafe-society/.
Gray, “Streetscapes/1040 Park Avenue.”
Oh, for color photography back in those days. Would be so wonderful to see the rooms in color.
Loved this! If those walls could talk, too.