While more interested in her own authenticity and expressiveness than provenance and trends, Brenda Cullerton is no slouch when it comes to creating camera-ready rooms.
She also isn’t afraid to admit the cost of getting things right, and she does so with a wonderful sense of humor. Talking about the striped Roman blinds in the living room of her East Village loft in Manhattan, she claims the fabric “nearly wiped out my retirement fund.” If money were no object, she’s said she’d go for 17th-and 18th-century Venetian pieces. As someone who decorated her home without professional assistance, her way of looking at interior design is oh so relatable. In fact, Cullerton’s adventures in decorating led her to pen The Craigslist Murders, which she describes as “a novel about a female interior ‘desecrator’ killing trophy wives.”
Cullerton grew up in Connecticut, surrounded by chintz and loads of books, and she says her own place blossomed around her library. The bloom is evident in the living room, where the varied spines on the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves stand in sympathy with those jauntily striped shades.
From floor to ceiling and room to room, Cullerton’s home is a highly personal creation. Although not designed to impress, she does hope that what she has fashioned “reflects just some of the exuberance, the energy, the wild leaps of faith it takes to live, learn and remain in a city as exhausting but always alive as New York.”
Photography by Marco Bertolini.
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