If all the world’s a stage, as Shakespeare wrote, then AD100 designer Pamela Shamshiri and her client Jana Bezdek have conjured the ultimate set piece, a sumptuous, seductive Greenwich Village brownstone reimagined to court the muse of theater—and of life. Brimming with dazzling decorative flourishes, the house feels like a corrective to the current vogue for hushed, monochromatic interiors that find luxury in abstention. It’s a place where extraordinary furnishings, alluring colors, and rapturous artworks coalesce in a domestic temple of beauty dedicated to the goddesses of magic, mystery, and creative invention.
“I see the house as an extension of my life in the theater and my love for the performing arts,” says Bezdek, a cofounder of FourthWall Theatrical, a boutique production company that specializes in original musical theater and female-driven stories. Part pied-à-terre—Bezdek and her family are based in Los Angeles—and part workshop, the dwelling serves multiple functions as a place for read-throughs, cast meetings, and gatherings of every sort. In fact, the house was christened with a performance and fundraiser for FourthWall’s latest production, The Lonely Few, which The New York Times lauded as an “achingly romantic, softly sexy, genuinely rocking new musical.”
“We wanted to tap into the history of the West Village as a crucible of bohemian culture, a place where people came to dream and create,” Bezdek says of the inspiration behind her happily eccentric, more-is-more decor. Shamshiri underscores the design’s homage to the avant-garde subculture that flourished in the Village in the early decades of the 20th century. “We looked at people like the Dada artist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, who walked the streets of the Village with a birdcage on her head. Also Mina Loy, the pioneering poet and painter, and the arts patron Mabel Dodge Luhan. These were radical women who flouted convention and made their lives into art,” Shamshiri offers.
The designer’s free-spirited embrace of theatrical wonder manifests almost immediately upon entry into the parlor, which is wrapped in a mural by Dairo Vargas, a Colombian-born, London-based artist who infuses classical Renaissance and Baroque pastoral painting with a jolt of psychedelic abstraction. “The mural is a work of genius. It has such depth, color, and richness. I get lost in it,” Bezdek muses. The parlor’s heady mix of furnishings—encompassing signature pieces by Osvaldo Borsani, Mattia Bonetti, Piero Portaluppi, Paul Frankl, and Marc Du Plantier—likewise strikes a note of genre-bending, time-traveling originality, simultaneously traditional and unorthodox. In the garden-level conservatory, where Bezdek hosts her colleagues for meetings around a custom Martino Gamper table, a compelling mural by Italian artist Roberto Ruspoli pays tribute to the deities of theater in a composition that nods to the work of Jean Cocteau and Picasso.
The decorative drama takes a moody, mystical turn in the parlor lounge adjacent to the main parlor, which Bezdek has dubbed the séance room. Wrapped in paneling lacquered in a dark reddish-brown color, the space demonstrates the influence of Studio Shamshiri’s work at the Maison de la Luz hotel in New Orleans, another project steeped in witchy magic. Here, the atmosphere is buoyed by animal motifs, illuminated zodiac signs of gilded glass set within the millwork, towering moiré curtains, and an imposing Carlo Bugatti throne chair. “Jana wanted the lounge to be a dreamy, liminal space, full of possibilities and strange, metaphysical energy,” Shamshiri notes.