Home Boy

I Globetrotting writer and fashion-world insider Derek Blasberg conjures the perfect setting for his next chapter—a sophisticated Upper East Side apartment

I moved from St Louis to New York in 2000, the year I turned 18 and graduated from high school. 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 then, but buying this apartment on the Upper East Side was the ultimate inflection point in morphing from an overachieving Midwestern teenager into a New York City professional.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

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 my whole 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 cut-outs 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 Sharpie.

In New York, my experiences in real estate were scattered. Literally. My first-ever address was an NYU dorm room on the west side of Washington Square Park. From there I moved to a walk-up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn; a hovel in SoHo; a Tribeca high-rise; and, just before I moved into this place, a charming pre-War building in Chelsea 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.