hen interior designer Glenn Gissler went
apartment hunting six years ago, the longtime
Manhattanite had been to Brooklyn very few
times before. He was astounded by the charm
and amenities he found in the upper duplex of a
circa 1890 row house in central Brooklyn Heights. “The
apartment exceeded my list of ‘must haves,’ “ Gissler says,
recalling his initial reaction: “You mean I can have all this
— two floors, a fireplace, a washer–dryer and a terrace —
ten minutes from Greenwich Village?!”
Now, furnished and decorated with what Gissler calls a
“collage of art and artifacts,” the two-bedroom co-op is
even more enviable. Sleek and cozy, modern and historic
at the same time, it comprises a book-lined dining room,
kitchen and guest room on the lower level, and two rooms
with beamed ceilings, reminiscent of a Paris atelier, above.
And who wouldn’t want to wake up to a view of a terrace
filled with greenery?
Gissler’s atmospheric apartment, filled with intriguing
pieces representing styles and periods from antiquity to
the present day, is “a distillation of the designer’s development
over the past three decades,” as the designer’s
website puts it. Every item, from millennial-old clay pots
to a Swedish mid-century lamp resembling a meteorite,
from a Keith Haring poster given to Gissler by the artist
at an anti-nukes demonstration his first summer in New
York to framed childhood drawings by his now-teenage
daughter, reflects who he is (an eBay addict, to be sure)
and where he comes from. “Their cash value is irrelevant,”
he says. “It’s whether it speaks to me.”
It was inevitable that Gissler would end up living in a
vintage house (he also owns an 1840s farmhouse on eight
acres in Connecticut). He saved his first building at the
age of 18 — a Gilded Age Milwaukee mansion he rescued
by convincing his father, then an editor at Milwaukee’s
largest daily newspaper, to write an opinion piece embarrassing
the bankers who had refused to lend $200,000 to
a preservation group to buy the building and keep it from
destruction. The banks changed their tune and the Pabst
Mansion still stands as a historic house museum.
Metal and glass sculptures from the 1970s add intrigue to
the mantelpiece, which is original to the building.
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