LOVE LANGUAGE

In her new home in NYC, Celerie Kemble makes room for all the things and people she cherishes

- AMANDA BROOKS

ONLY Celerie Kemble could gut-renovate and decorate a five-story Manhattan town house in nine months. But let's start with how she chose the house in the first place. It was 2022; her marriage had ended several years earlier, and Kemble had been renting a place with her three young children, sons Rascal and Wick and daughter Zinnia. She was taking the slow road to buying until her partner, Stephen Roesler, nudged her with a listing of a town house in the often overlooked East Side neighborhood of Murray Hill, just around the corner from the Morgan Library. On paper, it seemed underwhelming-it was unusually narrow in width and not really her style. Even her longtime friend Bronson van Wyck looked at the listing and replied "Jeez, Cel. You don't want to live in a dollhouse. Twelve feet wide isn't worth canceling my lunch for." But Kemble knew she had to start looking, and as besties do, van Wyck showed up.

They walked into a well-proportioned, 19th-century Italianate house with high ceilings, original crown moldings, and no less than eight fireplaces. By the time they reached the second floor, he looked at her and said, "Offer full asking."

And that's when the work began. Since the '90s, Kemble has run the New York office of Kemble Interiors, a design firm founded by her mother, Mimi McMakin, in Palm Beach, Florida. Together they are responsible for some of the most beautifully designed houses, private clubs, and hotels on the East Coast. As Kemble tells it, the key to their success is the team of exceptionally talented builders, artisans, and craftspeople that they habitually work with, some for many decades now. When it came to the lightning-fast reinvention of her new home, "We were like the Amish," she says. "We all came together to raise the barn."