Building DRAMA

IN A STORIED UPPER EAST SIDE APARTMENT, CHAIRISH COFOUNDER ANNA BROCKWAY TURNS UP THE HEAT WITH HIGH-VOLTAGE COLOR AND AN ULTRACHIC VINTAGE HAUL.

- CHAIRISH COFOUNDER ANNA BROCKWAY

Books on New York architecture and design preside over the dining room's antique and vintage fu rniture (seating, Chairish; table, Amy Meier). Painted pedestal, KRB.OPPOSITE: de Gournay's Hippolyta's Forest wallcovering creates a dramatic twostory woodland in the curved stairwell.

ANNA BROCKWAY HAS TAKEN A LOVER-not a human, a pied-àterre in New York City. An affair decades in the making, Brockway's love story began when she accompanied her dad on his business trip to the Big Apple at just 10 years old. "Over pancakes at The Carlyle hotel, he gave me some money and told me to ask the concierge what to do and left me for the day.

I spent the morning at The Met, lunch at the Empire State Building, the afternoon at Fiorucci, and topped it off with an ice-cream sundae at Rumpelmayer's," recalls Brockway. "It was the beginning of a love affair with New York that never left me." Next came her crush phase when, as an art history undergrad at Columbia University, she fastidiously scooped up whatever intel she could find on historic New York buildings, even sneaking into famed architect Robert A.M. Stern's graduate-level courses. "That's where I learned why I loved what I loved," Brockway says.

After college Brockway moved to California, where she enjoyed a successful career in fashion marketing, became a mother to three children, and cofounded Chairish, the antiques and vintage e-commerce platform, with husband Gregg. Over the years as work brought Brockway to New York monthly, she felt occasional pangs for the city and its storied architecture, but she anesthetized them, throwing herself into building a family, business, and home in California.