For decades, Wendy Goodman has been a chronicler of good design in the Big Apple. As design editor of New York magazine, she produces its weekly Design Hunting feature and a new video series, Interior Lives; through her reporting, she has uncovered the city’s most intoxicating interiors. Her third book (and the first to document her own career) hits shelves in September.
My mother, a watercolorist and fabric designer, was so industrious, so creative and so independent. In our first-floor apartment on Park Avenue and East 93rd Street, she used peg board in the broom closet to hang paintings, sculptures, my brother’s little corgi toys, old watches—this wonderful assemblage of things that interested her. She did everything like that. She saw things she loved and translated them into her own in the way she could. She is 97 now, and still absolutely elegant and amazing. My father was a surgeon. We never moved—we had this stability. I just loved getting home from school; it was busy, my mother had something cooking and it always smelled good.
I’ve always been obsessed with people, their behavior, why they make the decisions they make. The way they dress, the way they decorate, the way they talk to people. I’m just very curious about people. When I started, magazines were the only way you could find out how people dressed, how they lived, why they did the things they do. You had to open a magazine.
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