American Beauty

GLOBETROTTING WRITER AND FASHION-WORLD INSIDER DEREK BLASBERG CONJURES THE PERFECT SETTING FOR HIS NEXT CHAPTER – A SOPHISTICATED UPPER EAST SIDE APARTMENT IN NEW YORK

- Derek Blasberg

I moved from a small town in Missouri to New York in 2000, the year I turned 18. That means that last year, 2018, was the moment I had lived here for exactly as long as I had lived there. I didn’t realise it at the time, but buying this apartment (my first real apartment) on New York’s Upper East Side was the ultimate inflexion point in morphing from an overachieving Midwestern teenager in a small town into a New York City professional.

Consistency is the word I’d use to describe my first 18 years: I lived in the same bedroom in the same house in the same suburban neighbourhood all my life. (Boring is another word, but it’s not as polite.) By the time I left, I had wallpapered the room – including the ceiling – with intricate collages made with

cutouts from fashion magazines, filled the bookshelves with biographies of old Hollywood stars and Jackie Kennedy, and scribbled ‘New York or bust’ on my white cotton bedsheets with a black felt-tip pen.

In New York, my experiences in the property market were scattered. Literally. My first-ever address was a New York University halls of residence. From there I moved to Brooklyn; a hovel in SoHo; a Lower Manhattan high-rise; and, just before I moved into this place, a charming prewar building on the West Side that featured the ultimate metropolitan extravagance: a doorman. To each apartment, I’d drag all my earthly possessions, which consisted of clothes, clothes, and more clothes, and a burgeoning collection of embroidered pillows.