What Stays With You

Everything in collector and curator Pierre Apraxine’s West Village apartment has a life of its own.

- By Wendy Goodman

BOOKS, JOKES PIERRE APRAXINE, who has a lot of them, are “like a flood. Slowly, slowly there are more and more, and by the time you find a place for them, it’s too late.” He laughs when he says this; of course, he loves books—he is a scholar and curator. His two-bedroom in a classic West Village Bing & Bing building is full of them, cohabitating with his eclectic and erudite collection of art, furniture, and artifacts. “What you see now are basically the things which have passed through my hands and stayed,” he says. “Most of the things that I ‘collected’ found their place in museums and institutions and so on, but the things that I am surrounded with—they got here and never left.”