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    Melissa George Brings Cinematic Glamour to a 17th-Century French Manor

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    FROM A DISTANCE, Visan, France, resembles a Provençal village like any other, charming but unassuming: a crop of pale stone buildings on a hilltop surrounded by vineyards. During the medieval period, however, the region was the seat of powerful dignitaries, including the Dauphin of Viennois, a count whose family owned the village’s now-ruined castle. In 1349, Humbert II — the last dauphin before the title was transferred to the French crown — burdened with debt and without a male heir, ceded his remaining land to the king. Five years earlier, in a similar exchange with the pope, who then led the Catholic church from the nearby city of Avignon, he had offered up Visan. The village became part of the papacy’s wealthy enclave, remaining so until the French Revolution; its historic center is still lined with the commanding houses built for nobles and members of the papal court.The actress gives a tour of her home in Provence, which she’s filled with delicate details like floral furniture and a pink marble sink.Gautier BillotteThe most stately of these is a five-story, 17th-century mansion overlooking the town’s central fountain. Arranged in a U shape around a small internal courtyard shaded by cypress and lime trees, it has an elegant stone facade with rows of arched windows reaching up toward a thick terra-cotta tile roof. Since 2020, it has been a retreat for a transplant of a different kind: the Australian actress Melissa George, 48, who moved to Paris from New York with her sons Raphael, now 10, and Solal, 8, in 2016. Working with the Peruvian-born, Paris-based interior architect Diego Delgado-Elias, 44, she has restored the building’s splendor, transforming the 6,500-square-foot residence into an elegant but comfortable eight-bedroom home perfectly suited to someone who, as she does, lives to entertain.In the library, painted in Farrow & Ball’s Cinder Rose, a pair of vintage fringed slipper chairs and a sconce from Barracuda Interiors.Clément VayssieresEVERYONE TALKED ABOUT ‘the actress’ in the village,” George says of the initial interest in her and her plans for the house. She was widely assumed to be American, in part because of her roles in such U.S. television dramas as “In Treatment” and “Grey’s Anatomy.” But many of her neighbors have since become her friends: In the summer, the village children often cool off in her pool and, most nights, there are wine tastings in someone’s cellar. “We have a little club called Les Perchés, which means ‘the eccentrics,’” she says.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      When Nate Berkus Decorates Your Home, It’s Best Not to Change a Thing

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      Just ask the actors Patrick Page and Paige Davis, whose Upper West Side apartment has remained virtually untouched for two decades.Patrick Page and Paige Davis met in the mid 1990s, during New York rehearsals for the first national tour of the musical “Beauty and the Beast.” But with Mr. Page working on his scenes in one studio (he played Lumière), and Ms. Davis, an ensemble member, singing and dancing in another, they didn’t really get acquainted until performances began in Minneapolis.“We started hanging out as friends, and we’ve been hanging out ever since,” said Mr. Page, 61. The couple’s 2001 alfresco nuptials were chronicled on the TLC series “A Wedding Story.”For several years, the vivacious Ms. Davis, now 54, was the host of TLC’s “Trading Spaces,” a home improvement show (wherein neighbors, backed by a design team, would redo a room in each other’s homes on a $1,000 budget), and later returned to her theater roots, starring in “Chicago” on Broadway. Recently, she completed an indie short film that’s due out this year.Husband-and-wife actors Patrick Page and Paige Davis live in a two-bedroom co-op on the Upper West Side that Nate Berkus decorated 20 years ago, for an episode of “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      in Television

      Eboni K. Williams and Her ‘Harlem Jewel Box’

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      The broadcaster and author’s brief to her designer was simple: ‘Imagine if Josephine Baker lived in Harlem today. That’s what I want this apartment to look like.’When Eboni K. Williams moved to New York from Los Angeles in 2014, to take a job as a correspondent at CBS News, she knew exactly where she was going to live.“No disrespect to any other borough or any other part of the city, but being a Black woman from the South, it had to be Harlem U.S.A.,” said Ms. Williams, 39, a native of Charlotte, N.C. “It was important for me to walk out my door every day and feel the spirit and energy of the ancestors who lived there — James Baldwin and Malcolm X and Lorraine Hansberry and Josephine Baker.”Ms. Williams, a lawyer, writer and broadcaster (Fox News, WABC Radio and REVOLT and GRIO cable networks), who is probably best known as the first Black cast member of “The Real Housewives of New York City,” landed at Riverton Square, a large rental development near the F.D.R. Drive, between 135th and 138th Streets.“Looking at it, you would think it was a housing project, but it has a real legacy. Baldwin lived there, and so did David Dinkins,” said Ms. Williams, referring to the former mayor of New York. “If it was good enough for them, it was good enough for me.”But life is complicated, and love sometimes requires a change of address. From 2019 to 2021, Ms. Williams, the author of the recently published “Bet on Black: The Good News About Being Black in America Today” and the host of the podcast “Holding Court with Eboni K. Williams,” found herself in TriBeCa, in a three-bedroom sublet at the Four Seasons Private Residences, with her fiancé, a financier. They have since ended their relationship.Eboni K. Williams, an author, lawyer and TV, radio and podcast host, lives in a one-bedroom condo in Harlem with her tricolor Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, Carey James.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesEboni K. Williams, 39Occupation: Lawyer, journalist, authorHarlem on my mind: “It meant something to me, as a Black woman, to land in a neighborhood that has meant so much to Black people.”“I’m glad I had that experience,” Ms. Williams said. “Because as gorgeous as the unit was, when I went to buy a place coming out of the lease, I had learned what was really important to me.”For starters, that meant an apartment that was a little more down-to-earth, literally. “We were on the 67th floor, which was not my jam,” she said. “I have a fear of heights.”An open kitchen was also a must. “That was a $7 million apartment, and it had a galley kitchen,” she said. “I love to cook, so I hated the galley kitchen.”And also: Who needs a dining table? “I never used it,” she said. “I ate in front of the TV.”But having three bedrooms was nice. It allowed for a dedicated office, and she realized she “needed a separate work space.”“Oh, honey, aesthetics are very important to me,” Ms. Williams said. “I know what I want my house to look like.”Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesAnd she will not soon forget the abundance of storage space at the Four Seasons. “That place introduced me to California Closets,” Ms. Williams said, referring to the company that creates custom organizing systems. “I had them do every closet in my new apartment.”About that new apartment: Ms. Williams went into contract two and a half years ago, based on the model unit, in a building under construction in central Harlem — one bedroom, floor-to-ceiling windows, nine-foot ceilings, high-end finishes — and moved in last June after many delays, with her Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, Carey James (named for her grandfather).“It was the only place I looked at. I’m very decisive in that way,” she said.“I’m a girl from the South, and I’m a pageant queen, and the finishes were very important to me,” Ms. Williams continued. “It was important for me to have Carrara marble countertops. It was important for me to have the beautiful white-oak herringbone floors throughout. I’m allergic to carpet. Not really, but you know what I mean.”Ms. Williams’s brief to her interior designer, Ty Larkins, was simple and to the point: “Imagine if Josephine Baker lived in Harlem today. That’s what I want this apartment to look like. I want it to be a Harlem jewel box.”Bunches of flowers add pops of color. (Ms. Williams is partial to pink.)Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesIn something of a nod to Ms. Baker’s adopted city, Paris, a 19th-century French mirror leans against the wall in the living room. A French desk of the same vintage anchors the work space. Baccarat candlesticks catch the light on the coffee table.Ms. Baker sometimes performed in head-to-toe pink. For her part, Ms. Williams used to be “pink, pink, pink, pink, like a 12-year-old lives here,” she said. But she has learned moderation. True, the two velvet accent chairs in front of the tall windows in the living room are dusty rose, the side chair has pink-and-gray stripes, and the grasscloth on the walls is a very pale blush, “but there are also some masculine elements,” she said, pointing to the oversized chocolate-brown tufted sofa.If you want to get invited back, don’t touch the earth-toned Hermès blanket that’s neatly folded over an arm of the sofa. “It’s just for show,” she said.Although Ms. Williams chose her apartment quickly and surely — and although her determination to plant roots in Harlem was unswerving — it was an emotionally complicated business.“I was going to buy a million-dollar condo somewhere in New York,” she said. “But because people are paying that and more in my building, it’s displacing many of those who have called Harlem home for years. That’s the truth. It’s like any privilege — what do I do with that privilege? To me, it’s about preserving the culture that came before me, so it still lives beyond me. The moment you walk through the door, there is this explosion of Black-centeredness and Black celebration.”The canopy bed adds a touch of Hollywood glamour.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesBusts of the journalist Ida B. Wells and the abolitionists Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass are on display in the cozy alcove Ms. Williams uses as her office. The bathroom walls are papered with designer Sheila Bridge’s pattern Harlem Toile de Jouy, which trades France’s classic pastoral motifs for those reflecting an African-American heritage.On one wall of the living room is a print depicting the stowage of a ship carrying enslaved Africans. Almost directly opposite is a painting by the Zimbabwean artist Kudzanai Chiurai featuring a Black woman in front of a line of microphones. “This is about the amplification of the struggle and liberation,” Ms. Williams said.“This place,” she added, “is dripping with Black identity. That’s me. Literally. It’s my name: Eboni.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. More

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      Rupert Holmes, on Creating a Victorian-Flavored Escape in Upstate NY

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      The artist you know from ‘The Piña Colada Song’ has a new play about Ruth Bader Ginsburg and a new novel coming out next year — but still no plans to live in the city.Over the decades, the playwright, novelist and singer-songwriter Rupert Holmes has collected quite the haul of trophies and treasures. They include — deep breath, now — two Tony Awards (for the book and score of his 1985 musical “The Mystery of Edwin Drood”), two Edgar Awards, 16 gold records, and 15 platinum records, including for his 1979 earworm “Escape.” (You undoubtedly know it as “The Piña Colada Song”).In his home studio, Mr. Holmes has a framed thank-you note from Barbra Streisand, for his contributions to her 1975 album “Lazy Afternoon,” as a composer and co-producer, and a signed Rosebud matchbook from Orson Welles, whom he met on a talk show. He also has a piano bench that belonged to Marvin Hamlisch, a gift from Mr. Hamlisch’s widow.But there is one thing that Mr. Holmes does not have — has never had and never wanted to have — despite all of his Times Square-centric pursuits: a permanent address in New York City.“When I’m working on a show, I get some sort of accommodations in Manhattan for a couple of months,” said Mr. Holmes, 75, whose new play, “All Things Equal: The Life & Trials of Ruth Bader Ginsburg,” will be at the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, N.Y., from Nov. 3 to Nov. 27, and whose thriller “Murder Your Employer,” the first book in a new series, is due out in February. “But for me, New York has always been a place that’s like a thermonuclear reactor, where everything interesting and exciting happens. And then you want to leave at the end of the day and calm down.”Rupert Holmes, the Tony Award winning writer and composer of the 1985 musical “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” and “The Piña Colada Song,” lives with his wife, Liza, in a colonial-style house in Cold Spring, N.Y.Andy Ryan for The New York TimesRupert Holmes, 75Occupation: Playwright, novelist, singer-songwriterLost in translation: “When I was three and a half, my parents told me we were moving from England to a place called Long Island. I thought, ‘Oh, pirates and lagoons.’ And it turned out to be Levittown, Long Island.”In 1980, Mr. Holmes and his wife, Liza, a lawyer, settled in Tenafly, N.J. They had a snug house they loved in a nice community that was within quick reach of the city. But when the couple’s 10-year-old daughter, Wendy, died suddenly from an undiagnosed brain tumor in 1986, “we couldn’t stay there,” he said. “Her friends would walk by the house; her bedroom was empty. We just couldn’t do it. So we moved to Scarsdale.”Again, nice house, quiet street, easy commute. There they stayed for 22 years. “Then, once again, a child issue,” Mr. Holmes said.Timothy, the younger of the couple’s two sons, is “severely autistic,” he said. “He doesn’t have language, really,” and he was aging out of a local care facility. There was an excellent adult-treatment program farther afield, but it was open only to residents of Putnam and Dutchess Counties. Relocating was less than ideal, “but we tried to make the most of it,” he said. “We wanted this to feel like a good thing.”Thirteen years ago, the Holmeses moved to a hillside colonial-style house in Cold Spring, N.Y., where, depending on the room and the window, they could see woods, gardens, the Hudson River, Storm King Mountain, Crows Nest Mountain, West Point or some fine combination.The piano bench in the basement studio once belonged to Marvin Hamlisch, with whom Mr. Holmes collaborated on a stage adaptation of the 1963 movie “The Nutty Professor.”Andy Ryan for The New York TimesThe couple chose Cold Spring in part because of a key resemblance to Nyack, where they both grew up and were high school sweethearts: The main stem in both villages slopes down to the Hudson. The house was also appealing for its proximity to the train station — a 12-minute walk, critical for Mr. Holmes, who has never learned to drive. “One of my eccentricities,” he said.But the move was not without drama. The couple stayed in Scarsdale for several months after closing on the property so that Mr. Holmes could finish a project in Manhattan. It was winter, and the pipes in the new house froze and burst, flooding the place. To focus on the good news, the house was insured. And because they hadn’t yet shuttled their possessions upstate, nothing was lost. Plus, they now had an opportunity to make some design adjustments.Borrowing square footage from a porch, they built a sunroom adjacent to the dining room. On the second floor, a wall between two small bedrooms came down to make a more expansive office for Mr. Holmes. Soil was excavated so that he could have a window — let there be light — in his basement studio. And the powder room was redone in a symphony of black-and-gold lacquer to serve as a color-appropriate backdrop for his many framed gold records. When a plumber comes to do repair work, Mr. Holmes said ruefully, “his quote changes after he’s been in the bathroom.”The British-born Mr. Holmes began life as David Goldstein; he changed his name when he got into the music business in the late 1960s. “Rupert” was a nod to the poet Rupert Brooke. “Holmes” was a tip of the deerstalker to …. well, it’s pretty elementary.A kidney-shaped platform is a favorite spot where Mr. Holmes likes to read al fresco.Andy Ryan for The New York TimesWith its show posters, Hirschfeld caricatures, framed sheet music and shelves of scripts, awards and branded mugs, the house could be viewed as celebration of Mr. Holmes’s life in the entertainment business. But really, it’s a valentine to Victoriana and to Baker Street’s most famous resident.The Victorian hat stand in the foyer sets the tone. Three rare Sherlock Holmes movie posters and an Inverness cape hang in the dining room, along with a painting of the legendary detective and Dr. Watson that Mr. Holmes commissioned. The Victorian cabinet that he and Ms. Holmes bought early in their marriage sits in the living room. A rose-colored globe lamp on a marble-topped Victorian-style table keeps the theme going in the sunroom. A Victorian student lamp helps light the office.Just before the pandemic, Mr. Holmes’s next-door neighbor decided to sell his house and an adjoining parcel of land. “I realized this was the last piece of property in Cold Spring with a view of the Hudson that did not have a house on it,” Mr. Holmes said. “And I was probably the only person in the world who wouldn’t want to develop that land and build a house on it to sell or live in.”The view from the bay window in the living room takes in the Hudson River and Storm King Mountain.Andy Ryan for The New York TimesHe knew that if he didn’t buy the land, someone else would. Hello bulldozers, goodbye expansive water views. “Without a moment’s thought, I offered him well above what he was asking,” he said. “So now I’ve gone from having a house with a small footprint to having around three acres.”Cleared of scrub and weeds, the terrain has become a sloping pocket park complete with a gazebo. A small platform beneath towering oaks is a favored destination for Mr. Holmes when he wants a break. Or, as he once so lucratively put it, an escape.For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. More

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      After Decades, the Philharmonic’s Hall Sounds and Feels More Intimate

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      Raise your hand if you ever thought you would go see the New York Philharmonic, America’s most venerable orchestra, by entering off Lincoln Center’s plaza through a wide-open garage door. No one?But yes: The main entrance of David Geffen Hall — the Philharmonic’s home, newly, completely and happily renovated after a wait of decades — is now a big glass wall that can swoop up in good weather. And the past week has been bright and mild in New York. So as audiences drifted in for some of the first concerts in the revamped hall, the lobby inside and the plaza outside merged, without any barrier.It’s a new degree of informality, matched once you get into the transformed auditorium. The vast, drab shoe box that the city knew as Avery Fisher Hall after 1973 — a few years before a major remodeling attempted to fix the acoustics that had been criticized since the building first opened as Philharmonic Hall, in 1962 — has been gutted.Five hundred seats have been eliminated, along with the proscenium. The stage has been pulled 25 feet forward, and seating has been stretched around it. The once-dingy interior is now acres of honey-colored wood, the seats upholstered in a floating-flower-petal motif. A theater in which it once felt like miles from the back row to the timpanis now verges on intimacy.There is intimacy in how it sounds, too. Any judgment on a hall’s acoustics is highly provisional after just a few visits. For the rest of October’s opening events — and the rest of this season — I will be listening to the Philharmonic play in the new Geffen, and hearing how the experience changes as I sit all over. The orchestra will be changing, too, adapting to its home the way a player adjusts to a new instrument.But a mighty improvement is already obvious. The acoustical problems of the hall post-1976 have perhaps been overstated. Especially as it aged, it sounded so bad at least in part because it looked and felt so bad.Now the sound, like the whole experience of being there, is far more immediate and warm. We hear with our eyes as well as our ears, and simply seeing your fellow audience members sitting above and around the stage makes Geffen sound more human.On Wednesday, the Philharmonic’s first subscription program in the space, the third movement of John Adams’s “My Father Knew Charles Ives” demonstrated that magical orchestral alchemy in a superb hall: the way dozens of musicians playing softly can feel huge. A low growl in the basses was palpable, not just audible. At quiet dynamics throughout the evening — like the brooding opening of the catacombs section of Respighi’s “Pines of Rome” and the ambiguous haze of Tania León’s “Stride” — the sound was glistening and lucid.Van Zweden and the orchestra on Wednesday; the sound was glistening and lucid in quiet passages.Amir Hamja for The New York TimesIf, at its loudest and densest, the Philharmonic seemed strident and blurrily blaring rather than richly massed and blended, with the brasses and percussion overwhelming the woodwinds and strings, that may be less an inherent quality of the room than a remnant of the orchestra’s notoriously blunt and punchy style.That style — which has not always been discouraged by Jaap van Zweden, on the podium as music director for another two seasons — evolved partly because of the shortcomings of the old hall, the need to force the sound to reach its distant upper reaches. But what felt necessary merely to be heard in that former space could profitably be eased in this new one. The Philharmonic no longer has to blast to a faraway audience, but can play more like it is sharing the music with a bunch of friends gathered around the campfire.The Reopening of David Geffen HallThe New York Philharmonic’s notoriously jinxed auditorium at Lincoln Center has undergone a $550 million renovation.Reborn, Again: The renovation of the star-crossed hall aims to break its acoustic curse — and add a dash of glamour.‘Unfinished Business’: After a 17-year run in Los Angeles, Deborah Borda returned to the New York Philharmonic, which she led in the 1990s, to help usher it into its new home.San Juan Hill: Etienne Charles’s composition for the reopening of the hall honors the Afro-diasporic musical heritage of the neighborhood razed to build Lincoln Center.Timeline: From a troubled opening in 1962 to a full gutting in 1976 to the latest renovations, here is a brief timeline of the long road to the new hall.It’s been a long journey to that campfire. Most observers swiftly recognized that the 1976 renovation, which built a new theater in the shell of the 1962 building, had not solved the hall’s acoustical issues, and had introduced new aesthetic ones. But the will was not present — and relations between the Philharmonic and Lincoln Center, its landlord, were too dysfunctional — to do much about it.Around the turn of the 21st century, a plan emerged to demolish the building entirely and start over, but the Philharmonic was so spooked by the scheme’s probable cost and duration that it tried to pick up and move to Carnegie Hall, its home before Lincoln Center was built. That escape failed miserably, leaving Avery Fisher Hall as the center’s problem child, ignored in a sweeping, six-year campuswide refurbishment that finished in 2012.In 2015, David Geffen restarted the hall project with a $100 million gift — minus the $15 million required to buy off Avery Fisher’s heirs, who were surprised to learn that Fisher’s name wouldn’t be permanently attached to the building. But the design that was developed in the wake of Geffen’s donation once again spiraled out of control in ambition and price tag.It wasn’t until two pragmatic chief executives, Deborah Borda at the New York Philharmonic and Henry Timms at Lincoln Center, arrived a few years ago that a workable project — which would, as in 1976, fill the existing shell with new contents — was finally agreed on. And when the pandemic shut down performances, construction was fast-tracked so that the opening has come two years earlier than planned, without exceeding the $500 million budget.The only part of the 1960s auditorium that remains is the zigzag ceiling, and it’s been painted black and hidden behind a billowing silvery sheath. In one crucial way, though, this is a restoration: At 2,200 seats (versus 2,700 starting in 1962), the hall finally has the capacity for which its acoustics were originally designed.Over the next weeks and months, the orchestra will be adapting to its home the way a player adjusts to a new instrument.Amir Hamja for The New York TimesIn pulling the stage forward and surrounding it with seating, the new theater, designed by Gary McCluskie of Diamond Schmitt Architects, with Paul Scarbrough in charge of the acoustics, borrows the approach that was workshopped with a temporary structure for over a decade at Lincoln Center’s summertime Mostly Mozart festival. That setup was in turn influenced by the “vineyard” seating of the Philharmonie in Berlin and its most famous American descendant, the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.If it lacks Disney’s flair, the Geffen auditorium, clean and straightforward, is more successful than the hall’s public spaces, which have been redesigned by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. Their main achievements are in decluttering. The box office has been moved to a corner, allowing the lobby to extend far deeper off the plaza, reducing crowding in a space now more appealing to linger in. Having lost its weird mudroom of an archival display, the grand promenade one floor up is much more expansive, too. The corner of 65th Street and Broadway has become a small performance space visible from the street.But the eclectic decorations — the vaguely tree-shaped lighting fixtures on the first tier balcony, for example, and the scattering of curvy couches in the lobby — have the brightly clashing patterns and generic whimsy of a Marriott, a college student center or the new Delta Sky Club at LaGuardia. The champagne-colored curtains surrounding the grand promenade, stitched with bits of light-catching gold, have the mass-market feel of those spaces, too — bathed in the permanent deep blue light of a catering hall cocktail hour.A week in, the sprawling spans of frosted glass around the promenade are already smudged, which is a little icky and a little charming: The new Geffen Hall already has a comfortable, lived-in feel. That seems to be the point. After all, Marriotts, student centers and airport lounges are designed to be antitheses of the intimidation often associated with classical music. But in eschewing intimidation, did the space have to reject glamour, too?Some of the ways the new hall intends to embrace a broader audience already feel persuasive. A concert hall’s quality in unamplified music is no indication it will work when amplified, too. (Carnegie Hall is a classic example.) But when its retractable fabric dampening panels are opened and line the walls, the new Geffen is as good with amplification as without.“San Juan Hill: A New York Story,” Etienne Charles’s multimedia excavation of the history of the neighborhood razed to build Lincoln Center, which officially opened the hall on Saturday, begins with a small jazz ensemble playing alone for half an hour. The amplified sound was direct but resonant; even Charles’s slightest finger taps on a drum registered, just enough.And on Tuesday, the mandolin virtuoso Chris Thile convened a handful of guests for the first in his series of events this season modeled on bluegrass jam sessions. Merrill Garbus, the singer of the band Tune-Yards, came onstage in bright green socks, so Thile took his shoes off, too. The sound was crisp yet tender, the moody lighting classily done.It was astonishing and delightful to realize that Geffen Hall had become a place where artists could pad around the stage in their socks, or groove as quietly as they would in a tiny jazz club. On Tuesday there wasn’t that vaguely embarrassing feeling of an orchestra hall slumming it with pop. Geffen felt — and sounded — natural.Near the end of the show, Thile looked out into the darkness and smiled broadly. “Let’s do this lots more times,” he said. More

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      Plotting the Future of the Most Storied Studio in Jazz

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      ENGLEWOOD CLIFFS, N.J. — Hidden along a commercial strip north of the George Washington Bridge, surrounded by car dealerships and characterless corporate offices, is hallowed ground for jazz.There, tucked in a one-acre wooded lot, sits a squat concrete-block structure built in 1959 by Rudy Van Gelder, the polymathic former optometrist who became the genre’s most influential recording engineer. On thousands of albums made at his studio there by the likes of John Coltrane, Horace Silver, Dexter Gordon and Bill Evans, Van Gelder developed ways to capture sound with renowned clarity and depth, earning the respect of musicians and the envy of other engineers.“History was made there,” Herbie Hancock, who recorded at Van Gelder’s studio numerous times, said in an interview. “History that defined what jazz was then and what jazz is now. The roots of it are from those records that were made at Rudy’s studio.”Yet after Van Gelder died in 2016, at age 91, the future of his studio — known to jazz fans everywhere from LP credits, but seen by few besides the musicians who recorded there — was left in doubt. Van Gelder willed the property to his longtime assistant, Maureen Sickler, but gave her no instructions about what to do with it. Sickler remembers only that her mentor had been devastated by the demolishment of his parents’ house in nearby Hackensack, where he began his recording career, capturing Miles Davis and others in the family living room.Van Gelder at his recording console in the late 1980s. The building housing his studio was designed by David Henken, an apprentice to Frank Lloyd Wright.James Estrin/The New York TimesAfter about five years of work to restore Van Gelder’s equipment and obtain historic-property status for the building, Sickler and her small team — including her trumpeter husband, Don, and Perry Margouleff, another audio engineer and studio owner — are now midway through a plan to make Van Gelder’s haven a full-service recording studio once again, and create a nonprofit organization that would assume ownership of the space and ensure its longevity.How that transition will work — and even whether the contemporary music industry will have use for a 63-year-old studio built for acoustic jazz — is an open question. In recent months, the Sicklers, with Margouleff’s help, have been busy booking sessions, tidying up the overgrown grounds and even getting the studio answering machine working again. But Sickler, 76, said she is determined to see it through.“I feel very strongly that musicians should have the opportunity to record in that incredible acoustic space, and to feel the history and the inspiration that lives there,” she said. “Musicians who come into the space are awed about who has recorded there. They need the opportunity to make their own history in that unique room.”INSIDE VAN GELDER’S studio, the sense of history can be almost overwhelming.The building was designed by David Henken, an apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright, and its wide, square main room has a cathedral-like ceiling of cedar planks, supported by four Douglas fir arches that meet at a 30-foot apex. Most recording studios are windowless caves; Van Gelder’s has calming views of trees in the backyard. One recent sunny afternoon, a Hammond C-3 organ that was played by Ray Charles and Jimmy Smith sat uncovered on one side of the live room. Inside an isolation booth was a 1950s Steinway grand, in what looked like perfect condition save for some marks gouged on its lid — by Thelonious Monk.The Van Gelder console today. In recent months, Maureen Sickler, who is overseeing the studio, and a small team have been busy booking sessions.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesUnusual among major studios, Van Gelder’s was purpose-built and not adapted from another space, like Abbey Road in London or Columbia Records’ former studio on East 30th Street in Manhattan, which had once been a church, the jazz historian Ashley Kahn said. It was also owned and operated by one man, and doubled as Van Gelder’s home, with a modest but spacious apartment just up a set of stairs from the studio floor.Many jazz fans would immediately recognize the studio interior from photos on albums released by labels like Blue Note and Impulse!, two of Van Gelder’s biggest clients. The cover of “A Love Supreme” pictures Coltrane in front of a railing just outside the studio door. The master saxophonist’s recording, captured on Dec. 9, 1964, is perhaps the most famous one made there.A visionary engineer who always sought out the most advanced microphones and other equipment, Van Gelder was also a persnickety character who forbade most musicians from touching anything. Hancock remembers the time, after years of recording there, when Van Gelder, speaking from behind glass in the control room, finally gave him permission to plug in his headphones.“I looked around at the other musicians; they were staring at me,” Hancock recalled. “‘Did Rudy say I could actually plug it in?’ ‘Yeah, we heard that, too.’ So I did. I was like, ‘Wow, I finally rose to the top!’”Van Gelder was secretive about how he achieved his sound; over the years that secrecy has become the audio equivalent of urban legend, with stories circulating that mingle fact and fiction. Did he really substitute “dummy” microphones when photographers came to shoot sessions? Probably not. Did he wear white gloves when handling equipment? Maybe, though the truth is unclear. “White gloves was an exaggeration,” Sickler said. “Reality is different.” She did not elaborate.From left: Maureen Sickler, her husband, Don, and the audio engineer Perry Margouleff. All three are working to restore Van Gelder’s haven as a full-service recording studio and create a nonprofit organization that would ensure its longevity.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesBefore Van Gelder brought on Sickler as his assistant in 1986, he had long run the studio entirely by himself, even setting up the musicians’ chairs. Sickler’s apprenticeship began modestly — “I got to set up chairs,” she said — but he soon showed her the ropes of all of the studio equipment. If anyone knows Van Gelder’s recording secrets, it is her.“I think I was closer to Rudy than I ever was to my own father,” Sickler said.After decades of running sessions almost daily, Van Gelder began to slow down in the mid-2000s, as his health deteriorated. Even then, his studio was little known outside music circles. “It was hiding in plain sight all these years,” said Jennifer Rothschild, a local historic preservation consultant.One Sunday afternoon in August 2016, Rothschild and other members of the Bergen County Historical Society met Van Gelder at his studio, after one jazz-loving member placed a cold call. They encouraged the engineer to apply for state and national status that would designate the property a historic building, but he wasn’t persuaded, Rothschild said, and the historians decided to return with a sharper pitch. Four days later, Van Gelder died in the apartment upstairs.By then, the studio was cluttered with medical equipment, and the custom Neve recording console that had been installed in 1972 was in rough shape — only six of its 24 channels were functioning properly. In 2018, Sickler met Margouleff, who was well versed in Van Gelderiana but had never set foot inside the studio. “Rudy wouldn’t let other engineers in the door,” said Don Sickler, who works with his wife in booking and running the space.During the pandemic, Margouleff, a Neve specialist, renovated the console piece by piece in his workshop. His dream, like that of the Sicklers, is for the facility to return to its former glory.“The idea is to make sure that this studio lives in perpetuity,” Margouleff said, “as a facility for people to continue to record music together in an ensemble fashion and in an acoustic environment.”Recently, the studio has had at least one recording session a week, Sickler said. In April, a few weeks after winning the Grammy Award for album of the year, Jon Batiste, the jazz pianist and bandleader, booked a one-day session at the Van Gelder studio, after learning that the place he had seen cited on countless records that had shaped him as a musician was finally available.“To visit and record there was a pilgrimage,” Batiste said in an interview. “There’s some sort of spiritual, metaphysical reality there that makes it feel like you’re stepping into a ritualistic space.”Instruments and equipment at Van Gelder’s studio.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesTHAT FEELING OF awe will certainly be the greatest calling card for the revitalized studio. But it may also be an obstacle, said Kahn, who, with Rothschild, helped write the studio’s applications for the New Jersey and National Registers of Historic Places. (It was added to both listings this spring.)“The challenge for the Van Gelder studio now is how to deal with its history and also go forward as a commercial enterprise,” Kahn said. “You don’t want people to come in there only saying, ‘I want the studio where Coltrane recorded.’ You want it to be a studio that can meet present-day standards, and not marginalize it as just a historic shrine.”The building’s presence on the state and national registers does not protect it from being altered or even demolished by a future owner, Rothschild said. To gain that protection, Sickler has applied for a preservation easement, which would be attached to the property’s deed and involve periodic inspections. It also costs $10,000, and Sickler said that the studio’s recent recording work has raised only enough money to cover the property tax, which is nearly $40,000 a year.One decision facing Sickler and any future operators is whether to stick to jazz, or open the studio to other kinds of music. Jazz, of course, was Van Gelder’s great passion, and what the facility was designed for. But even at its peak, the space was also used for blues, folk music, polka and spoken word; the first recording session there, in July 1959, was with the West Point Cadet Glee Club.Don Sickler, who has been devoted to classic jazz repertory for decades, said he favored sticking with acoustic jazz, and gruffly dismissed the idea of recording Broadway cast albums or rock ’n’ roll. (For Weezer’s latest album, “OK Human,” released in early 2021, a string section was recorded at the Van Gelder studio.)Batiste also urged the Sicklers to hold fast to jazz. “Sticking to their guns of it being acoustic music, making it something that is an outlier in the culture, is what will actually be the right thing to do,” he said.Sickler is more open-minded about what the future of the Van Gelder studio might bring.“Of course, musicians familiar with the studio’s history, and with the work of Rudy Van Gelder, should have access,” she said. “But the live room loves all sounds.” More

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      ‘Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel’ Review: Bohemia’s Holdouts

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      This documentary offers an immersion in the lives of residents who keep the building’s spirit as a home for artists alive through a protracted renovation.Early in “Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel,” a construction worker says that the famed building has “a lot of ghosts.”A home for untold authors, artists and musicians since it opened in the Gilded Age — and probably the only dwelling anywhere that housed, at different times, Mark Twain and superstars from Andy Warhol’s Factory — the Chelsea Hotel, as seen in this documentary from Amélie van Elmbt and Maya Duverdier, appears haunted even by its current residents, who wander halls that have been filled with plastic sheeting.Shot beginning in 2019, while the hotel ground through a contentious and protracted renovation, the film offers an evocative, melancholy immersion in the lives of a handful of holdouts who have maintained the building’s bohemian spirit even as their apartments have been cut up, almost as if they themselves were part of the architecture. The occupant of Janis Joplin’s former suite displays the soap dish he kept from a gutted bathroom. (“She probably didn’t use the soap, from what I know about Janis Joplin,” he says.)A wire sculptor, a dancer and the head of the tenants’ association (who yearns for construction to finally finish, though other residents disagree) are among the eccentric figures who catch the directors’ eyes. The artist Bettina Grossman, who died in November at 94, says she’s the oldest person in the building and that, unlike her neighbors, she was never offered money to leave.The film avoids providing too much context, a choice that contributes to the spectral atmosphere. The directors aren’t after a news piece; they’re just listening to voices that continue to echo in the corridors.Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea HotelNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      Irwin Young, Patron of Independent Filmmakers, Is Dead at 94

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      As the head of a prominent film processing laboratory, he helped directors like Spike Lee, Michael Moore and Frederick Wiseman early in their careers.Irwin Young, who through his Manhattan film processing laboratory gave support to the early careers of directors such as Spike Lee, Frederick Wiseman and Michael Moore, died on Jan. 20 in Manhattan. He was 94.His daughter Linda Young confirmed the death, at a rehabilitation facility.Over nearly a century, DuArt Film Laboratories processed and printed studio features, documentaries, newsreels, boxing films from Madison Square Garden, network news footage and commercials. But Mr. Young, who took over the company when his father died in 1960, was best known as an ally of independent filmmakers, some of whom could not always pay for his company’s services on a timely basis early in their careers.“He was the biggest mensch in the business,” the documentarian Aviva Kempner, who produced “Partisans of Vilna” (1986) and directed “The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg” (1998), said in a phone interview. “He really cared for the subject matter you were making a film about. If you needed a favor, he was there for you.”Mr. Young deferred $60,000 in costs incurred by Mr. Moore for three years as he made “Roger & Me,” his documentary about the social damage caused by General Motors’ layoffs of 30,000 workers in Flint, Mich. Warner Bros. later paid $3 million for the rights.When Mr. Lee was a graduate film student at New York University, his films were processed and printed at DuArt. So was his first feature, “She’s Gotta Have It” (1986).“I didn’t have the money, but Irwin let me develop the film, print the dailies, and he gave me some slack; he’d say, ‘When you get the money, pay me,’” Mr. Lee said in an interview. But Howard Funsch, DuArt’s treasurer, threatened to auction the negative if Mr. Lee didn’t pay. Mr. Lee said he found the money.He added: “I don’t think Irwin knew that Howard was putting the squeeze on me. And it doesn’t detract from how Irwin believed in and supported young filmmakers.”Mr. Young had a practical side as well. He made two investments in the 1970s that helped secure DuArt’s long-term future: He acquired the 12-story building in Midtown Manhattan where the laboratory had long been located, freeing it from the whims of a landlord; and he bought a two-thirds interest in a television station in Puerto Rico, which brought in a strong flow of revenue that helped improve DuArt’s bottom line.He also oversaw DuArt’s expansion into a process that benefited independent filmmakers: blowing up 16-millimeter negatives into 35-millimeter prints, which have a better chance at being commercially viable.And he added to DuArt’s photochemical film processing business by branching into film-to-video transfers and online video editing in 1970, and into digital work, including effects, titles and restorations, in 1994.But last August, Ms. Young, DuArt’s president and chief executive since 2017, announced that its business was being shuttered because it was no longer economically viable to stay independent. Its building was recently put up for sale.Mr. Young served with various organizations that dealt with independent filmmakers, including Film at Lincoln Center, where he was president, and Film Forum, where he was chairman.In 2000, he received the Gordon Sawyer Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his technological contributions to the film industry.Irwin Wallace Young was born on May 30, 1927, in the Bronx. His father had been a film editor before he and other partners acquired a film lab that was going out of business. His mother, Ann (Sperber) Young, was a homemaker.“I used to see film processed, amazing to a child,” Mr. Young told The New York Times in 1996.The family name had been changed from Youdavich by his uncle Joe, the lyricist of songs including “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter.”After serving in the Navy, Irwin entered Lehigh University. He graduated in 1950 with a bachelor’s degree in engineering and then joined DuArt, where his roles included working in black-and-white film quality control and being part of the team that processed Eastman color negatives for the first time at any film lab. After his father died, Mr. Young became DuArt’s president and chief executive.Mr. Young’s interest in independent film was ignited when his older brother, Robert, was a producer and writer and the cinematographer of “Nothing but a Man” (1964), a feature about a Black couple dealing with racism in Alabama. Irwin Young provided all of the film’s laboratory work.“I was attracted to independent filmmakers because of their spirit,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 2003. “I came from a very political family, so I responded to a lot of their messages. We needed each other.”Mr. Wiseman needed Mr. Young’s patience when his first documentary, “Titicut Follies” (1966) — about the way patients were treated at the State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Bridgewater, Mass. — was banned by a state court on the grounds that it violated the inmates’ privacy.“I didn’t pay him for six years because all my money went into the lawsuit,” Mr. Wiseman said in an interview. “And he was always friendly and helpful about distribution; he knew everybody.”Mr. Young’s support of filmmakers led him to become an accidental preservationist: He stored their negatives, at no charge, some for decades, largely on the top floor of the DuArt building on West 55th Street. He reasoned that if he held on to the negatives, he might generate more business from making prints.But, he told The Times in 2014: “I have trouble throwing away film. We never threw anything away. It’s because we were film people.”Film cans were stacked, floor to ceiling, often without any idea what was inside or who the director was. In 2013, three years after Mr. Young closed down his traditional film processing business, a project was started to create an index of the thousands of negatives there.Mr. Young began a collaboration with the organization IndieCollect, which sends orphaned film negatives to archives such as the Library of Congress and the Motion Picture Academy; restores them; and finds new audiences for the films.“We went through 5,000 films — about 50,000 cans,” said Sandra Schulberg, the president of IndieCollect. “Irwin was happy to come up as we were doing the inventorying. Each can was like opening a locked treasure.”She said that her group found homes for 3,500 of the negatives.Negatives of films by Mr. Lee, Mr. Wiseman, Gordon Parks, Woody Allen, Jonathan Demme, James Ivory, Ang Lee and Susan Seidelman were found, as were forgotten works like “Cane River,” a 1982 love story dealing with race issues made by Horace Jenkins, an Emmy Award-winning Black director, who died shortly after the film’s premiere in New Orleans.In addition to his daughter Linda, Mr. Young is survived by another daughter, Dr. Nancy Young; his brother; and four granddaughters. His wife, Diane (Nalven) Young, died in 2004.Mr. Moore knew little about filmmaking when he began making “Roger & Me” and was told by another director, Kevin Rafferty, that he should bring his undeveloped film to Mr. Young.“He said ‘Let me develop this for you,’ and he watched the first reels and said, ‘Listen, this is incredible, I’m going to help you, and you can pay me what you can,’” Mr. Moore said, recalling his first conversation with Mr. Young in 1987. “That was almost three years: from early 1987 to 1989, up until the last print was needed to go to the Telluride Film Festival.”He added, “Without his patronage, I’m convinced there wouldn’t have been a ‘Roger & Me.’” More

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      From a Burger King to a Concert Hall, With Help From Frank Gehry

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      The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s ambitious new home for its youth orchestra is the latest sign of the changing fortunes of Inglewood.INGLEWOOD, Calif. — Noemi Guzman, a 17-year-old high school senior, usually has to find a corner someplace to practice violin — the instrument she calls “quite literally, the love of my life.” But the other Saturday morning, Guzman joined a string ensemble practicing on a stage here that is nearly as grand and acoustically tuned as the place she dreams of performing one day: Walt Disney Concert Hall, the home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.“This is beautiful,” Guzman said during a break from a practice session at the Judith and Thomas L. Beckmen YOLA Center, her voice muffled by a mask. “To have a space you can call your own. It is our space. It is created for us.”Inglewood, a working-class city three miles from Los Angeles Airport that was once plagued by crime and poverty, is in the midst of a high-profile, largely sports-driven economic transformation: The 70,000-seat SoFi Stadium, which opened here last year, now the home of the Rams and the Chargers, will be the site of the Super Bowl in February and will be used in the 2028 Summer Olympics. Construction is underway on an 18,000-seat arena for the Los Angeles Clippers, the basketball team.But the transformation of Inglewood, historically one of this region’s largest Black communities, is also showcased by the 25,000-square foot building where Guzman was practicing the other morning. The building, which opened in October, is the first permanent home for the Youth Orchestra Los Angeles, and is the product of a collaboration involving two of the most prominent cultural figures in Los Angeles: Gustavo Dudamel, the artistic director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which oversees YOLA, and Frank Gehry, the architect who designed Walt Disney Concert Hall.Mario Raven, right, led students in a singing and music reading class: “Here we go — one, two, three!”Rozette Rago for The New York Times“This was an old bank,” said Dudamel, who has long been friends with Gehry, a classical music lover who can often be spotted in the seats of the hall he designed. “Then it was a Burger King — yes, a Burger King! Frank saw the potential. What we have there is a stage of the same dimensions as Disney Hall.”The $23.5 million project is a high-water mark for YOLA, the youth music education program that was founded here 15 years ago under Dudamel and that he calls the signature achievement of his tenure. It serves 1,500 students, from ages 5 to 18, who come to study, practice and perform music on instruments provided by the Los Angeles Philharmonic. It was patterned after El Sistema, the youth music education program in Venezuela where Dudamel studied violin as a boy.And it is one of the most vivid examples of efforts by major arts organizations across the country to bring youth education programs out into communities, rather than concentrating them in city centers or urban arts districts. “You can’t just do it downtown,” said Karen Mack, the executive director of LA Commons, a community arts organization. “If you really want it to have the impact that’s possible with that program you have to bring it out to the community. It has to be accessible.”Gehry called that idea the “whole game.”“It becomes not the community having to go to Disney Hall,” he said, “but the Disney Hall coming to the community.”For Inglewood, the new YOLA Center is a notable addition to what has been a transformative wave of stadium and arena construction, which has spurred a wave of commercial and housing development (and with that, concerns about the gentrification that often follows this kind of development). Until 2016, Inglewood was known mainly as the home of the Forum, the 45-year-old arena where the Lakers and Kings once played before moving to what was known as the Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles, and Hollywood Park Racetrack, which closed to make way for SoFi stadium.Some instruments cannot be played through masks; those lessons are often held outdoors these days.Rozette Rago for The New York Times“We’ve never been known for cultural enrichment,” said James T. Butts Jr., the mayor of Inglewood. “That is why this is so important to us. What’s happening now is a rounding out of society and culture: we will no longer be known for just sports and entertainment.”Even before Beckmen Center opened, YOLA could be a heady experience for a school-age student contemplating a career in music. Guzman, who joined the youth orchestra seven years ago, has played bow to bow with members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, under the baton of Dudamel. YOLA musicians have joined the Philharmonic at Disney Hall, the Hollywood Bowl and on tours to places including Tokyo, Seoul and Mexico City.Christine Kiva, 15, who started playing cello when she was 7, is now studying with cellists from the Philharmonic. “It’s helped me develop my sound as a cellist, and work on a repertoire for cello,” she said.Inglewood is the fifth economically stressed neighborhood where the youth organization has set up an outpost. But in the first four locations, it shares space with other organizations, forced to fit in without a full-fledged performing space or practice rooms. “We were making the project work in spaces that weren’t specifically designed for music,” said Chad Smith, the chief executive of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.Now, the words “Judith and Thomas L. Beckmen YOLA Center,” named after the philanthropists and vineyard owners who made the largest donation to the project, stretch out across the front of the renovated building overlooking South La Brea Avenue and the old downtown. Dudamel has an office there. Members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic regularly show up to observe practice and work with students.This building has plenty of rooms for students to practice. There are 272 seats on benches in the main hall, which can be retracted into a wall, allowing the room to be divided in half so two orchestras can practice at once. The acoustics were designed by Nagata Acoustics, which also designed the acoustics at Disney Hall.YOLA, the youth music education program founded 15 years ago, now serves 1,500 students from ages 5 to 18.Rozette Rago for The New York TimesThe building had been owned by Inglewood, which sold it to the Los Angeles Philharmonic. “When we first walked into it, it still had the greasy smell of a Burger King,” said Elsje Kibler-Vermaas, the vice president for learning for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Gehry, who had worked with Dudamel on projects before — including designs for the opera “Don Giovanni” in 2012­ — agreed to take a look at the building, a former bank that opened in 1965.He said that when they brought him there, he was struck by the low ceilings from its days as a bank.“I said, ‘is it possible to make an intervention?’” recalled Gehry who, even at 92, is involved in a series of design projects across Los Angeles.By cutting a hole in its ceiling and putting in a skylight, and cutting a hole in the floor to make the hall deeper, he was able to create a performance space with a 45-foot-high ceiling, close to what Disney Hall has. “The kids will have a real experience of playing in that kind of hall,” he said.That turned out to be a $2 million conversation; the total price, including buying the building and renovating it, jumped from $21 million to $23.5 million to cover the additional cost of raising the roof, installing a skylight and lowering the floor.The building was bustling the other day. Students had come for afternoon music instruction from elementary schools, most in Inglewood, and after snacks — bananas, apples, granola bars — they raced to their lessons in reading music, percussion and how to follow a conductor.“Pay attention!” said Mario Raven, leading his students in a singing and music reading class. “Here we go — one, two, three!”The brass players were outdoors because of Covid-19 concerns (it’s hard to play a French horn while wearing a mask). As planes flew overhead, they performed High Hopes by Panic! at the Disco, suggesting that a youth orchestra need not live by Brahms and Beethoven alone.Students typically sit through 12 to 18 hours a week of instruction for 44 weeks a year. About a quarter of them end up majoring in music. Smith said that was reflected in the broader aspirations for the program. “Our goal wasn’t we were going to train the greatest musicians in the world,” he said. “Our goal was we were going to provide music education to develop students’ self-esteem through music.”Dudamel said his experience as a boy in Venezuela had been formative in bringing the program to Los Angeles. “I grew up in an orchestra where they called us, in the press, the ‘orchestra without a ceiling,’” he said in a Zoom interview from France, where he is now also the music director of the Paris Opera. “Because we didn’t have a place where to rehearse. We have materialized a dream where young people have the best things they can have. A good hall. Great teachers.”“Look, this is not a regular music school,” he added. “We don’t pretend be a conservatory. Maybe they will not be musicians in the future. But our goal is that they have music as part of their life, because it brings beauty, it brings discipline through art.” More