Ask Nick Olsen, ebullient Manhattan interior decorator, to nail down his creative philosophy, and he offers a cheerful response: ‘Clever ideas late at night.’ A ruminatory pause follows, resulting in a slightly longer definition. ‘All sorts of thoughts go round and round in my brain when the city that supposedly doesn’t sleep actually does go to sleep,’ though he adds a caveat. ‘What is sort of new and novel, and what is officially trying too hard? There’s a fine line there, I can tell you that, and I’m guilty of taking it right up to that point.’ Meaning orchidaceous efforts that he describes as ‘Little Lord Fauntleroy all grown up, with a bit of Queen of Sheba thrown in’.
That’s a fair approximation of the state of Olsen’s one-bedroom flat in the historic West Village, where the south Florida native has lived for nine years. Colours and patterns coruscate. Silhouettes shimmy and shake. Found objects improved with fresh coats of paint – among them, a garishly gilded prop-house looking-glass that he becalmed with a coat of Syrie Maugham white – are nestled amid auction wins smartly reupholstered in colours and fabrics that are determinedly jolly but historically flippant. Fluffy sheepskin seats on a pair of vintage Jansen side chairs in the Louis XV style? Why not? Chrome-yellow cowhide on a cabriole-legged antique Italian sofa? It seemed like a good idea at the time. Zebra stripes are stretched across a corner banquette, à la Elsie de Wolfe, but, as Olsen warns: ‘Animal prints can be chic, but not all animal prints are created equal.’
A sculpture that catches a visitor’s eye turns out to be nothing more than a planter turned upside-down, and paintings that look intriguingly ‘school of’ are flea-market flotsam with illegible signatures. ‘Sometimes you just see things and think: That speaks to me,’ says Olsen of his magpie manoeuvres. ‘I have to have that, because I’ll never see anything like it again.’ As for a plaster bust of classical mien, the decorator blithely identifies it – followed by a wicked grin, one must admit – as ‘a copy of a cast of a Greek chorus boy’. So what appealed to him about that winsome representation in particular? The bust may be cast gypsum, he explains, but someone applied a dark finish that gives it the appearance of carved basalt.
The mixmaster litany of objects would have puzzled the first inhabitants of Olsen’s residence, an 1834 Greek Revival mansion wrapped with narrow bricks and ornamented by a Doric-columned porch of brownstone the colour of ground cumin. The decorator occupies a piano-nobile fragment of the imposing house, which was ‘turned into condominiums 41 years ago, the very year I was born’. Gutted, too: every cornice, ceiling medallion and chimney piece had been ripped out and discarded, and every fireplace was firmly sealed. By the time Olsen took up residence, all surfaces had been painted landlord white, except the chimney breast, that having been scraped to a cliché of underlying masonry. (‘Unless you’re living in a converted factory, there’s no excuse for exposed brick.’) For nine months, Olsen lived with minimal possessions: a little sofa, a diminutive console table and a mattress set on the wood floor. As can be seen, he has more than made up for that paucity of belongings – and the naked chimney breast is enrobed in plaster once more.
For one mad moment, Olsen considered restoring the apartment by realigning doorways and walls and frosting the rooms with period-perfect mouldings. Multiple preparatory sketches later, and sobered by the likely expenditure, ‘I decided to just accept the wonky architecture and celebrate the giant windows and the high ceilings.’ That being said, the bedroom is so small yet so tall, about two-and-a-half metres square by three metres high, it might as well be a silo. One of Olsen’s late-night reveries resulted in the space being voluminously tented with royal-and-ice-blue taffeta, so the Jean Royère-style sleeper feels a bit like the state bed of a country house stuffed into a maid’s room. The textile tomfoolery also effectively masks the single window’s off-centre positioning and camouflages the awkwardly jutting closet. ‘Of course, I was not thinking about cohabiting when I designed this,’ Olsen says. His partner Sam Bowman’s daily ankle-grazing against the bed’s platform is ‘a small price to pay for glamour’.
Surprisingly, for an admirer of all things soigné, Olsen avoided installing a chandelier in the living room, which, for green-eyed real-estate groupies keeping score, has a ceiling that rises to more than four metres. ‘I don’t love overhead lighting,’ the decorator explains. ‘I don’t like much lighting at all, really. I can live with 15 watts or less.’ Instead, a cage-like form, reminiscent of a 1970s cube work by Sol LeWitt, is suspended above the room. It was made by Matt Steel, ‘a crackerjack woodworker who can take anything I sketch and make it perfection’. The same talent fashioned the bed, created a top for a metal table base of giant chain links, and transformed a large classical scallop shell into a handsome console. Steel also conjured a beefy chimney piece for the inoperable fireplace, framing it with angled sections of painted wood inspired by a 1770s Batty Langley door frame. Says a satisfied Olsen: ‘It doesn’t project too far into the room, but still has heft and presence.’ Ditto the small kitchen, which decorative artist Chris Pearson faux-finished as a Milky Way of ‘acid-trip terrazzo’ asteroids floating on a coal-dark ground. ‘It distracts from the fact that the room is not an architectural masterpiece.’
The giant Yves Klein-blue canvas that dominates one wall of the divertingly eclectic living room is one of Olsen’s DIY projects, its cerulean field obliterating an unsettlingly erotic image from the 1980s. ‘The proportions were great, but I was embarrassed even to send the movers to pick it up, in case they thought I actually liked that kind of art.’ What he does admire is the architecture-infused oeuvre of British contemporary artists Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell. Three of their large shadow boxes, exploded overhead views of industrial buildings, are mounted above the chain-link table. They fell into Olsen’s hands at an auction a decade ago, but he has made peace with their wear-and-tear imperfections rather than ringing a restorer. Pointing out a nearby plaster cast shadowed with fingerprints and peppered with minor chips, the decorator offers sage housekeeping advice: ‘Perfection is its own punishment’.
Details: nickolsenstyle.com
A version of this article appears in the October 2023 issue of The World of Interiors. Learn about our subscription offers
