In their work, Mr. Charlap Hyman and Mr. Herrero are “sprightly and democratic,” according to Maria Nicanor, the director of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. “Adam is adding himself to that lineage of people who make things well,” Ms. Nicanor added. “And their work is fun.”
Consider a solution Mr. Charlap Hyman came up with for Mr. Hirschfeld and Mr. Green’s Long Island library, a room that seemed a bit staid.
“The bookcases needed something,” Mr. Hirschfeld said. “We wanted to add some kind of decorative element. I didn’t know whether it would be tassels or edging or dust covers — and Adam came up with this idea of getting a not-very-special Persian rug and cutting out the medallions to create pelmets.”
The question, Mr. Hirschfeld said, was how to do it.
“With an X-Acto knife,” Mr. Charlap Hyman said.
Those pelmets now frame shelves crammed with the couple’s books, lending just the right ornamentation to the room at notional cost.
“The difference between what’s actually good and what’s priced like it’s good is so wide,” Mr. Charlap Hyman said. “As long as you’re going to spend a bunch of money designing or decorating a house, why not invent and create things that you can’t put a price on?”
At the start of the project, a broken-down piano stood in a living room. It was a prop for the listing and yet suggestive of the gaiety that must have filled this eccentric dwelling in its heyday. “It’s definitely a house that makes you think of parties,” Mr. Hirschfeld said. It was no challenge, then, for the couple to conjure the sounds of ice tinkling in crystal highball glasses and the laughter of guests floating up from the lawn.
After five years of design and construction, a version of that fantasy was realized when, in October 2025, the house was completed and the two men were married there, in a ceremony attended by 180 friends, among them the British royal Princess Beatrice.
Source:
www.nytimes.com
