Two Thursdays ago was a big night for renowned interior designer Carleton Varney.
Uptown, at tony Bergdorf Goodman, he was feted by assorted society swells who gathered in their finery to celebrate the release of his illustrated memoir, “Houses in My Heart: An International Decorator’s Colorful Journey” (Pointed Leaf Press). Later, down in edgy Alphabet City, a rather different crowd raised the roof at the public unveiling of Varney’s latest design project, a duplex cocktail lounge and piano bar called Ella.
At first glance, Varney, 69, hardly seems an obvious choice to decorate a bar on Avenue A. As chronicled in “Houses in My Heart,” the designer built his considerable reputation working in far more upscale enclaves.
A prolific author with two novels and more than 20 decorating books to his credit, Varney makes his first foray into first-person narrative with this colorful tome. It’s chockablock with Michel Arnaud photographs of more than two-dozen Varney projects – including the designer’s own residences in Manhattan and London’s exclusive Mayfair area, as well as homes for the Nederlanders and public spaces in the Breakers and the Waldorf Towers.
There are also scads of candid snapshots: Varney with his wife and two sons, and with a diverse cast of notables including Barbara Eden, Prince Charles and Lady Margaret Thatcher.
But for Varney, his involvement with the downtown lounge is a natural one.
“There’s a misconception about who I am,” he says. “Granted, I’ve had movie stars and presidents and prime ministers as clients all of my career, but when I was in my 30s I did a lot of nightclubs. I was part of the scene; when Billy Reed had his Little Club, I would be there dancing with Lynda Bird Johnson and George Hamilton.”
Ella’s three owners – brothers Josh and Jordan Boyd, Varney’s nephews, and Darin Rubell, cousin of the late Steve Rubell – and the lounge’s architect, Robert Stansel III, “have their own image as to what ‘now’ is,” Varney says. “But they didn’t grow up in the era of glamour. They never knew El Morocco or the Brown Derby or Chasen’s. So giving them a touch of what club glamour used to be has been a thrill for me.”
When it comes to glam, Varney learned from a master. His mentor, Dorothy Draper, was perhaps the most famous and influential of the Lady Decorators, a pioneering group of independent women who dominated the field of interior design in the early to mid-20th century.
“Draper made interior design a business,” Varney says. “Every decorator in the world can make pretty rooms, but Dorothy Draper created an international look.”
And when he became president of Dorothy Draper & Co. in 1964, he chose to retain his predecessor’s name on the front door.
“This younger generation never knew the one thing she represented: glamour,” Varney says. “Mrs. Draper used to walk around the office and say to her people, ‘No gravy! No gravy!’ meaning anything that looked creamy or beige-y. But then the world went gravy. It went gray and gravy and boring, and all the glamour was gone.”
But that allure is fully present in Ella’s décor, which is in large part a tribute to Draper and her bygone era. Varney incorporated elements of some of her most famous projects, including Hampshire House (an apartment complex on Central Park South) and Camellia House (a supper club in Chicago) – “all the black-and-white things she did,” he says.
Varney even persuaded the owners to paint Ella’s façade black with stark white trim, a nod to Draper’s audacious exterior treatment of several row houses on Sutton Place in the 1930s.
“It’s about the theater of it,” he explains. “Black and white gives the woman in the room the chance to provide the color. She can wear anything and be glamorous.”
Of course, Ella does provide its own color, too, like the lush orchid wallpaper, a Draper signature, in the bathrooms; oversized perfume bottles filled with tinted liquid and set on recessed glass shelves; bold Warhol lithographs, signed and numbered; and bright red accents throughout – from high-backed, semicircular scarlet chairs Varney created for the greenroom at this year’s Academy Awards to tiny crimson shades adorning each bulb on the silvered, crystal-trimmed chandeliers.
“You know the color Elizabeth Arden has on her door on Fifth Avenue?” Varney says. “It’s that same lacquer-red-lipstick color.”
Ella also pays homage to another important woman in Varney’s life: “Joan Crawford was my client for 21 years,” he says. “I loved her.”
That affection is reflected in enormous images of the screen legend throughout the club, including a striking portrait by famed Hollywood photographer George Hurrell.
“I remember the first time I did a project with her,” Varney says. “She looked at me with those big eyes and she said, ‘Remember, I created me. And everybody has the opportunity to make themselves who they dream themselves to be.’ “
To hear Varney tell it, though, his own path has been less deliberate.
“You reach this stage in a career,” he says, “and you look back at it and wonder how it’s gone so fast, and how any of it ever happened.”
That introspection, Varney says, was the impetus for “Houses in My Heart.”
“I just wanted to set the facts straight for my children,” he says, “what it was all like and how I became me.
“Honestly, when I started out I didn’t expect to become me, and I didn’t intend it. I just got on the road, and along that road I met lots of people – everybody from Judy Garland to Van Johnson to President Carter to the Shah of Iran. For me it’s been a life filled with this kind of fantasy.”