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 Entertainment | April 2005 
Hilary Swank and Chad Lowe: Oscar's Retreat
 Raul A. Barreneche - NYTimes
| The couple asked the designer Mark Zeff, center, to help turn their house into a retreat. (Photo: Scott Jones / The New York Times)
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For thriving actors a home can be little more than a way station, a place to park suitcases between acting jobs and publicity tours. So it was with Hilary Swank and her husband, Chad Lowe, when they moved into a town house they bought for $3.9 million on Charles Street in the West Village three years ago.
"When we started the project we would find three or four suitcases at the bottom of the stairs because they'd come back from a trip and had to run off again," said Mark Zeff, the architect who recently renovated the town house. "They were so busy they couldn't unpack for four weeks."
The house is on a leafy block in a neighborhood known for celebrity residents, but Ms. Swank, 30, and her husband, an actor and director, were never inclined to create a trophy home. "They didn't even want to paint the grungy front door until I persuaded them to," Mr. Zeff said.
As Mr. Lowe, 37, recalled: "I don't think either of us said, 'This is exactly the kind of house we always dreamed of.' Hilary and I are still searching for places we feel comfortable in." (The couple previously rented an apartment in the Flatiron district.)
But after Ms. Swank won an Oscar, her second, in February for her role as the boxer Maggie Fitzgerald in "Million Dollar Baby," the couple began to see the town house as a refuge from the paparazzi and the demands of a rising career. "When they realized they were going to spend more time here, the design changed," Mr. Zeff said.
At that point they became more involved, buying furniture that was more comfortable than the pieces they had originally considered and reworking the layout to include an informal eat-in kitchen with glass doors leading to a garden. (Unlike many brownstones, the house does not have a stoop leading to the living and dining rooms on the second level.) The kitchen also has a fireplace on one wall. "We love to have the French doors open with a fire going when it snows," Ms. Swank said.
The dining room was turned into an ornately detailed living room with a glittering chandelier that came with the house. The 1960's wood dining table serves as a writing table for Ms. Swank, stacked with piles of books, a silver beetle in a bell jar that Mr. Zeff picked out and a vintage magnifying glass, one of many in Ms. Swank's collection. For dinner parties Ms. Swank and Mr. Lowe drag the table to the middle of the room and group dining chairs around it. But more often dinner means a food delivery at 10 p.m., after they wrap up business calls to Los Angeles.
Even as her celebrity has soared, Ms. Swank has deliberately cultivated a low-key image. "I'm just a girl from a trailer park who had a dream," she said in her Oscar acceptance speech, referring to her upbringing in Bellingham, Wash.
So she was playing to character when she passed up the familiar list of decorators with celebrity clients in favor of Mr. Zeff. When she and Mr. Lowe called him on a friend's recommendation and described what they wanted, Mr. Zeff invited them to visit his roomy prewar apartment on the Upper West Side, which has a blend of Moroccan chandeliers, mirrors, a George III bureau and Bibendum chairs by Eileen Gray.
It was, he said, "exactly what they were describing: a mix of things that don't necessarily go together but look great together." They hired him within a week.
Ms. Swank was particularly taken with a 1940's plaster cast of Joan of Arc in Mr. Zeff's study, which he had found in the back of a pickup truck at a flea market in Southampton, N.Y. It is now on loan to Ms. Swank, who placed it in the corner of the second-floor study.
"I've loved Joan of Arc since I first saw the Ingrid Bergman movie," she said, referring to the 1948 film. "I'm trying to twist his arm to let me buy it." (Mr. Zeff is having a replica made for her.)
Mr. Zeff, 46, was not the obvious choice for an emerging Hollywood power couple. In 1988 House & Garden, then edited by Anna Wintour, included him in a group of rising young designers, among them Stephen Sills and Jed Johnson, calling them the "Clean Team" for their uncluttered, untraditional approach to decorating. But Mr. Zeff faded from view in the following years, partly as a result of the recession of the early 1990's and partly what he called his aversion to being perceived as an "expensive" decorator.
More than a decade later Mr. Zeff is enjoying something of a comeback. He designed the new Cornelia spa on Fifth Avenue, which opened in January, and is working with Jeffrey Chodorow on a number of restaurants and lounges to be called Social, the first opening in August in the old Hollywood Athletic Club in Los Angeles. He is also joining three town houses in the West Village for Annie Leibovitz, the photographer.
In his work with Ms. Swank and Mr. Lowe, Mr. Zeff saw himself as curator and coach. "We weren't decorating," he said. "We were collecting. I'm like a treasure hunter, a finder of absurd things I put together."
His strategy, he said, was to draw out the couple's own sense of taste. "I got a feeling that there was a very interesting, slightly weird side of them with a gypsylike aesthetic," he said.
On one wall of the second-floor sitting room is a piece of circus memorabilia: a framed clown head that bobs back and forth like a metronome. Ms. Swank bought it as a gift for her husband at an art fair in Virginia, when she was filming the 2004 HBO movie "Iron Jawed Angels."
Hanging in the second-floor parlor is an illuminated sign advertising "George White's Scandals" from the set of "42nd Street," one of Ms. Swank's favorite musicals. In November she took her mother, her grandfather and his companion to see the musical on Broadway; two months later, when it closed, she persuaded the producers to sell her the sign.
Ms. Swank and Mr. Lowe also scoured flea markets and antiques fairs in New York City with Mr. Zeff. "Mark didn't try to impose his style on us as much as integrate his eye to the reality of our lives," Mr. Lowe said. "You don't feel the heavy hand of a designer. That's what we responded to right off the bat."
Ms. Swank's two Oscars (she won her first in 2000 for "Boys Don't Cry") don't figure in the dιcor. The statuettes are stashed behind her computer in her office.
Working with Ms. Swank and Mr. Lowe was not always a smooth collaboration. "There was an ongoing argument over the paint color in the bedroom," Mr. Zeff recalled. "He wanted to go bright. She wanted to stay dark. We would buy things, and she would love it, but he wasn't really into it, or vice versa."
When Mr. Zeff presented them with the wallpaper for the second-floor study - a pattern of bare trees on a tea-colored background - Mr. Lowe balked. Ms. Swank, on the other hand, "freaked out, I loved it so much." They compromised by using the wallpaper on just one wall. The others were painted a chocolate brown, giving the room an elegant but offbeat vibe, like a ballroom crossed with a 1970's rec room.
The couple's busy schedules dragged the project out over a year and a half. "It was disconcerting," Mr. Zeff said. "We would get into a rhythm, and then they had to leave again. They wanted to be part of the process, but decisions could not be made quickly."
Ms. Swank, Mr. Lowe and their menagerie - two dogs, two parrots, a rabbit, and a cat - seem comfortably settled for now. But the acting life is rootless, and they do not rule out the possibility of starting over with a new place in a few years.
"We may be filming somewhere and fall in love with the place and want to move," Ms. Swank said. "I love living here, but I'm not so connected to the house that I can't live without it. Part of that comes from my background: I was fortunate not to have material things bring me happiness. This house is not going to make or break me."
In the meantime they are fine-tuning the details with Mr. Zeff: touching up the paint on baseboards and shelves in the office; installing lights for the custom bird cages Mr. Zeff designed for Seuss, an African Grey parrot, and Angel, a Senegal parrot; and designing a stand for an aquarium.
"Chad and I never see something as a done deal," Ms. Swank said. "We're a work in progress. It's a work in progress." |
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