Tasteful Friends: Introducing Howard Slatkin and His Many Rooms of Things

A bonus, Tasteful Friends: Howard has so much stuff, the NYSD had to do a second installment!

What is with these New York Queens? Their obsession with antiques is a stereotype right out of Boys in The Band.

It's boarding on Hording, the Queen Episode.

I wonder if these lamps with the generous mushroom heads are in his Balzac room?

I have to wonder if the NYSD staff is snickering at these piss-elegant queens behind their backs.

Still, I'm scrolling through the pictures and I'm actually starting to like the damned cluttered henhouse! It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to go that far over the top. His end tables have their own end tables! WHen he ran out of space for end tables, he pub little ones on the wall, and when he ran out of walls to overdecorate he went to town on the floors and ceiling!

And for some reason, I'm not seeing a bedroom. I'm not sure if it was too boring to rate a picture, or if he buried his bed under the knickknacks.

It looks like a Boys in he Band type, a Habsburg, and someone's grandmother got together to decorate...then exploded all over the walls.

Also, that "handmade inlaid floor that was inspired by Empress Maria Feodorovna's bedroom at Pavlovsk outside St. Petersburg" appears to be very poorly done.

I don't mind collectors, but this is too decoratory. I did not read the article, but it seems as if some decorator got him started on the boxes and ivories and he just did not know when to stop. I don't see a tru collectors appreciation for the objects as historical or artistic artifacts. As someone up thread wrote, they are just knicknacks.

Def some great things in there...but hard to focus on any one thing....looks like a store

I get claustrophobic just looking at the pics. How does anyone live with this much stuff.

I thought that as well about the floor, r5. The inlay isn't even and it looks liker it was varnished with maple syrup.

Nothing sticks out as being a unique or exceptional object. Quantity but very little quality.

The pictures look to be modern copies.

I'll bet he's into fisting.

I do really like the repurposed marble birdbath in the guest bathroom, but that's about it! I don't care if I never see another 'tole' whatnot;the bitch had them everywhere!

I also get the feeling that he never has guests. Ever.

Too fucking awful in too many ways.

I'd ask where is his collection of ancient Chinese ivory butt-plugs, but he's obviously sitting on them.

I don't hate it as much as I thought I would -- except the bathroom, which makes me bilious just looking at it.

I think the point is that Slatkin doesn't live there; no one does, and I don't think anyone could. Where would you put your plate down to eat? On your lap?

It's like walking through one of those museums from a 19th-century grand house left "as is" (Isabella Stewart Gardner, Frick...)

Some of the details (though not that inlaid floor, as mentioned above) are nice, and if you took 2/3 of the stuff out of the place, it probably would be a nice place for your 91-year-old widowed aunt to live.

OMG she sucked my dick one time about four years ago!!

Mr. Howard, he say I only person to touch his stuff, when I dus. Guadalupe do floor. I dus.

Creating the book was an "ordeal"?

MARY!

an absolute mess...nothing harmonizes with anything

Yeah, too much. I like the use of wallpaper and some of paintings, though. The only room where the too much works is the "screening room" - it has a cosy Eastern too much vibe so it's a bit warm.

I'm totally down with the urinal in the bathroom. Now that's how a stylish Bachelor would live.

It is impossible to appreciate anything. There is so much that it becomes a giant pile of clutter. Nothing looks special, just another piece of junk.

Absurd! Just a high class hoarder. Bleech!

Looks like the nightmare Marie Antoinette had after eating too much cake.

The dog is adorable.

The dog is stuffed!

Organized hoarding. Oh, and that [italic]wallpaper[/italic].

Slatkin: Some people say they love it because it’s so understated and so simple."

NYSD: I find that very hard to believe!

Slatkin: I know I have very nice things, and I’m very blessed but there are people who have things that are in a whole different category, museum quality pieces. So for those friends and clients, they’re seeing it through their filter. And then there are other people who look at it and think it’s so grand, I couldn’t sit on the furniture. It is all where that person is coming from and it has nothing to do with me.

~~~~~ Interesting that he denies responsibility for the mess he's made.

If he'd bought a tenth of those tsatskes, he might be in that "whole different category" he pines for.

I'm sure the comments here would really devastate him.

Not.

The posts in this thread are a perfect melange of exactly what is wrong with this place.

The apartment is a work of art. It's extremely upsetting that gay men cannot appreciate the aesthetic beauty of what he's created.

I wonder how the candles he makes and sells compare to those from "Serenity by Jan"? If I moved in his circles I'd try to get everyone to call him "Slats" or "Slatsy".

If he had more confidence he wouldn't have to decorate like that. It's just nonsense from start to finish.

All girlfriend needs is a swimming pool and a bad script about Salome.

I guiltily like some of the wall paper and the prints. I do! At least it's not that cold mint or pale blue that seems to be so popular. Nice warm browns and bronzes.

Some of the stuff is interesting but it just seems - not really inviting - ? Like someone else said, like a museum hodgepodge of stuff.

Normally I hate those neutral palates that are fucking everywhere these days, but IMHO all the browns and bronzes work as well as anything could. They give the space a warmth, a unity, a down-to-earth background that acts as an antidote to the insane tweeness of the million tchotchkes.

If he'd used a pastel color, it'd look like a Beatrix Potter character had won the lottery.

[quote]Tell us about your early days as a designer. Did you train?

[quote]No!

[quote]Now tell us something we didn't know!

So much stuff that you can't appreciate either the individual pieces or how they go together -- because they don't. Because there are too many of them. It looks like a shop, not a home.

I think we're all missing the point: His mother thought he was brilliant and she supported (maybe even pushed) him in all of his excesses.

Everything he does is for his mother.

Meester Howard, Joo are going to have to pay me double to clean these place. Also I will need to have my priest bless it first.

Consuela

[quote]Still, I'm scrolling through the pictures and I'm actually starting to like the damned cluttered henhouse!

Me too. I tried to hate it, but it has a strange sort of harmony. It's a cluttered mess, but it's at peace with itself. We've seen far worse on NYSD.

[quote]The apartment is a work of art. It's extremely upsetting that gay men cannot appreciate the aesthetic beauty of what he's created.

MARY!

that apartment is a fucking grandma tchotchke explosion.

God, that whole mess is an eyesore. He needs to store 95% of the clutter. The space itself, is really great.

I agree that he has a fine eye for color, R32. The problem is that he has all his things on display, which renders every single piece of furniture useless. Obviously, that's what he's going for, but was he trying to evoke the feeling of being in a shop, or can he just not bear to part with all his pieces?

I'm a sucker for the faux branches with crystals or even lights on them. The handmade tole prunus branches by Almon are adorable and they match that chandelier and the wallpaper perfectly. But that table is just awful, the kind of polished rock look that could be Roman, could be kitsch patio furniture from the early 1980s.

Are we certain he's not a J.K. Rowling character?

What do we think of the parquet flooring, the room where he had it installed upside down and then distressed to make it look old and weathered?

I can't decide if it's my favorite thing about the place or too pretentious even for the NYSD.

[quote]Yes, you’re right. And look at these little sandwiches you’re serving us. Martha would love them. My mother still serves these at tea time … but she lives in Africa.

[quote]I love the concept of the tea at 4:30 pm! But you say to an American, come over for tea and they just stare at you and say, “Do you mean cocktails?”

[quote]Oh dear … I’m eating this sandwich and now Winnie [Howard’s terrier] has drooled all down your jeans and they’re so perfect …

[quote]Oh, she can drool anywhere she wants. She’s my little doll.

That is the Maryiest exchange since Marys ever stared to MARY!

Can you imagine having to dust all that shit?

[quote]Can you imagine having to dust all that shit?

Si.

Sigh . . . .

More.

More.

MOAR!!!!!!!!!!!

I think the urinal makes his bathroom look like the men's room in a high class brothel. And what's with that ugly old television in the guest suite? Talk about being out of place. And he could have hit the guest room wall paper with a bit of glue before the photographers arrived.

The bed in the master suite is odd. It looks like someone thought the headboard and the footboard kinda, sorta looked like they might almost work together and made a bed out of them.

My cat would have fun in there.

I don't mind things in great abundance, rich materials and layered variety, bold gestures, and complexity, but this place tests my patience.

It's interesting, certainly, and points for that I suppose, but it's all too frivolous. His viewpoint of more is better and quality be damned just doesn't hold up.

There's a danger of having too many great things in a room as in the Paris apartment of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Berge, but at least theirs was a singular vision and the quality of everything was so high that the busy agitation could be happily ignored. At Slatkin's, there's too much stuff that isn't even at the better end of middling quality. The only choices Slatkin made were where to put things, not whether they ought to be been bought in the first place. And he goes for theatrical gestures that look good only from a distance; up close it's two-dimensional and stagey.

There are a lot of designers who do the same thing in their own places: treat them as "laboratories" and emphasize the "whimsy" of it all. That's usually a defense against making a real statement of their real work.

This sort of thing has been done well and it looks a lot better than here, done half-assed and with too loud a laugh from the designer.

I don't know how any of you can focus on just one thing to comment about.

Remind me again why we can't raise taxes on the rich.

Looking at those pictures gives me a sinus headache.

It looks like a showroom for Gump's. I wonder if he sells from home.

Perfectly expressed r49. There isn't one object of surpassing quality in the whole apartment. I suspect the majority of his baubles are brand-new made in China.

[all posts by tedious, racist idiot removed.]

He could pick up some used IKEA shelves off Craigslist for ten bucks and get those fucking books off the floor.

R55, I'm OCD too. What would bother me is the poor workmanship throughout the apartment. The badly done wooden floors in the foyer, the terribly done chair rails that sometimes miss the uneven floor by a few inches in the gallery, the wallpaper that needs to be touched up.

Interesting that his housekeeper uses a blow dryer to dust. I guess you would have to resort to that to stay ahead of it.

Is he gay?

[quote]Is he gay?

No, Blanche, but his lifestyle is.

He sold the place about four years ago for a little under $8 million. I'd love to see what it looks like now.

Looked like a piece of very very elaborate wedding cake, saved in a box for a few decades.