Architectural Digest

The esteemed editor—and author of a new memoir—packs his Greenwich Village residence with objects that chronicle his illustrious life and career. - By Nathan King Photography by Jonathan Becker Styled by Mieke ten Have

For all that’s been written about design and architecture, relatively little ink has been spilled on the subject of storage units. They tend to be dismissed as backwaters of impulse, dingy pens filled with the lame beasts we collect in our travels but never cull. And anyone who’s had to keep his life’s possessions in such a place has probably had to fend off that nasty little cough of a word: hoarder.

To Graydon Carter, a founder and coeditor of Air Mail and former editor of Vanity Fair, all of this seems terribly unfair. “No, hoarding is when you save newspapers,” he says. “What this is, is a collection of glorious finds from the past that just don’t fit my needs at present.”

At Carter’s storage unit in Litchfield County, Connecticut, you immediately notice a few things. First, there are no newspapers. Second, “unit” doesn’t begin to do justice to the Quonset hut–sized hangar, which is clean enough to pass a white-glove test. And finally, though taste and discernment can be two very different things, Carter possesses both in spades. One gathers that he’s held onto the title “editor” for so long precisely because he’s able to extend the job description to all areas of his life.

“You go through taste periods. I probably had 20 French doors, and I thought… ‘I’m not going to be needing them anymore.’ We just auctioned them all off,” he says. In other words, as much as the man knows how to collect, he also knows how to cut.

Since moving to New York in the summer of 1978, certain objects have trailed Carter from apartments to offices to storage and back again, cycling in and out like veteran players coming off the bench. In his current apartment in Greenwich Village, nearly everything except the millwork, which is prodigious, is recognizable from one of his previous homes: 19th-century porcelain sinks, mirrors, lighting fixtures, vintage pond yachts, an isometric map of Paris, old Leica cameras, and enough bound volumes of SPY (the satirical monthly magazine Carter cofounded and edited from 1986 to 1991) and Vanity Fair to make even the most barrel-chested moving man weep.

More constant than any of these objects, though, is an architect. As Carter writes in his recently published memoir, When the Going Was Good (Penguin Press), his close friend Basil Walter, the founding partner of New York’s BWArchitects, has helped him design more spaces than either is able to count. Among them an apartment in the Dakota; a town house on Bank Street; three Connecticut homes; three New York restaurants (the Waverly Inn, the Monkey Bar, and the Beatrice Inn); the Vanity Fair offices at 350 Madison Avenue, 4 Times Square, and One World Trade Center; Air Mail’s Greenwich Village offices; the Air Mail Newsstand on Hudson Street; over 20 Oscar parties; and 10 Cannes Film Festival parties.

Their latest undertaking was the downtown apartment Carter and his wife, Anna, founder (alongside Graydon) of digital communication and event platform Electragram, now call home. (Daniel Frisch served as the architect of record on the project.) The duplex is, in Carter’s words, “built like a boat,” with storage anywhere you’d think to look, and some places you wouldn’t. You could easily miss the bar in his office, which is a scaled-down version of the one in Henry Ford’s office in Ford v Ferrari.

Walter is quick to note that films—as well as vintage planes, trains, and automobiles—influence everything he and Carter work on. “Every time we start a project, he’ll say, ‘You have to watch this movie.’ So I watched The Big Clock or The Best of Everything.…  I’ve stolen it as a technique now with clients. I pick a movie, and I say, ‘You have to watch it,’ ” Walter says.

The two, who first worked together at the Dakota, quickly found a design lingua franca shaped by shared references: designer Pierre Chareau, photographer Julius Shulman, Colefax and Fowler chairman Tom Parr, and polymath Buckminster Fuller. “We both saw things in a similar way, and Graydon had a great, immediate vision for what he wanted,” Walter says.

It doesn’t hurt that Carter also knows how to sketch, which he starts doing to explain how the dining room at the 2014 Vanity Fair Oscar Party was inspired by a fabled restaurant from Hollywood’s Golden Age. “I wanted it to be a little bit like what I imagined the Brown Derby to be like. Banquettes all went around the room in a circle, and then you had tables in the middle, so everybody could see everybody else. That was the most important thing in that room.”

Opinions like these inform every one of Carter’s homes, offices, and parties, and the editor’s attention to even the smallest details emphasizes that what most people take for granted as intangibly well-functioning or attractive can actually be chalked up to a series of discrete choices. Carter maintains that any hardware should have flat-head rather than Phillips-head screws, desks and worktables must be electrified whenever possible, and a room ought to have many sources of light, all of them shoulder height or lower. “One reason why Elaine’s was so successful is that the lighting was so good,” he says, referencing the much lamented bygone Upper East Side publishing watering hole.

Asked if there’s something that makes successful editors equally good designers and collectors, Carter shrugs and shakes his head. But the vast filing system in his office, which comprises 60-or-so black file boxes from an old French law firm—another thing that’s been carried over from his previous homes—suggests that keeping the past close at hand has been helpful in both pursuits.

The best editors are unfailingly optimistic, have a nose for what’s worked before, and can squeeze fresh life from what others might prematurely discard. Anyone who dares to practice this faith of fractions has to believe, time after time, that everything will come together at its appointed hour. And when something new isn’t working, editing, like decorating a new home, can also mean having a great inventory to fall back on.