In 1983 Anne McNally, a newly married Frenchwoman living in New York, bought a three-bedroom apartment in a 17th-century building in the Place des Vosges. “I always wanted to keep something in Paris,” she explains, her accent thick as crème fraîche. “I didn’t want to think, Oh, I’ve moved to America.”
It would be easy to take that explanation as a throwaway. But as in most matters concerning McNally, one should not attribute too much to Gallic charm. A well-connected fashion editor, McNally has that in abundance, but her reason for keeping one foot in Paris was inspired by something less dramatic: her great pragmatic intelligence. Real estate in the Marais was shockingly cheap in the early ’80s; her friends the artist Brice Marden and his wife, Helen, were obsessed with the Place des Vosges. When they found her an apartment near the house where Victor Hugo wroteLes Misérables,McNally snapped it up.
For years the apartment served mostly as a holiday getaway for her and then-husband Brian McNally, a founder of the Manhattan restaurant Odeon and other eateries that catered to the city’s downtown elite. (The two are now divorced.) But in 2006, after a long run covering the fashion scene from New York, she returned to Paris and made the apartment her home base.
Previous owners had undertaken a few chic-for-ten-minutes improvements to the historic flat, so renovations had never been a priority. When she finally decided to make the place her own, McNally asked her friend and neighbor Jacques Garcia to help her pull the apartment together. “Jacques restored it to its original proportions,” she says. “He created double doors at the entrance and opened up the perspective onto the Place des Vosges.”
The decor did not require a career effort for the celebrated decorator, as McNally operates out of the Madeleine Castaing playbook: meaningful possessions, impeccable fabrics and colors, not too much of anything. The Louis XVI chairs in the living room come from her family; the raspberry sofa in the entrance hall was a long-ago gift from her grandmother. Her dining room chairs and living room cocktail table, once an opium bed, are vintage finds. And as for that little bear figure wearing Chanel in the foyer: “Karl Lagerfeld had some in his windows.”
The art is equally personal. McNally bought the Salvador Dalí lithograph when she was 18; she has collected the paintings of Kees van Dongen for decades. And if there is a significant portrait of her, it is largely because the artist, Anh Duong, is a friend.
You won’t find Julian Schnabel’s artwork on her walls, but his presence is very much felt here. McNally had seen an antique-tile-topped dining table Schnabel had made and asked if he might create one for her. “I’ll come and look at your place,” he said. “And if I like it...” Well, he loved it. In addition to the table, he made her a big bronze bed. “It’s like a house in my room,” she says. “It weighs...tons.”
