“I’m so excited to be living in my own home,” says socialite Olivia Palermo, surrounded by clothes racks, shoes and handbags in her colorful, 63-square-foot walk-in closet accented with a zebra-print rug. Olivia is photographing outfits she has selected for a short trip to Los Angeles so she’ll know exactly what she wants to wear while she’s there. “This is the space I love the most. You can see it the second you walk in,” she says. “It represents me.”
Inspired by pictures of Mariah Carey’s spacious NYC home, Olivia, 22, started searching for an apartment with enough room to create a large-scale, open-plan closet when she was ready to leave the nest—her mother’s three-bedroom abode on the Upper East Side—last summer.
With her heart set on downtown Manhattan, Olivia wanted to find a recently constructed, modern building with lots of natural light. After going through numerous brokers and scoping out 17 apartments—“The first one I saw was a dark studio with a Murphy bed and I had no idea what it was. My dad thought it was a good reality check for me”—she fell for this brand-new one-bedroom (with an office) on the 10th floor of a 21-story development on Leonard Street in Tribeca. “It was so new, the paint had barely dried,” Olivia proudly says of the apartment.
To furnish the place, Olivia and her mother, Lyn Hutchings, a partner at interior design firm Hutchings-Lyle, came up with the design plan: a 1960s look with a classic, old Hollywood feel. For the living room, the duo chose a comfy two-piece sectional sofa bed from Jennifer Convertibles. Next, Olivia fell for a baby-blue Bing side table from Gracious Home, which adds to the cheerful tone. “Then my mom slowed me down,” she says. “She made me realize that buying furniture is not like shopping for clothes. You need to think of the look of the entire apartment.” Taking the time to scour design centers and antique shops paid off: The eye-catcher in the room is an Hermès tray, a vintage find from the Hamptons, placed on top of a Carlyle Custom Convertible white-leather coffee table with nailheads.
The bedroom is personalized with a zebra-print antique lamp with a string shade (“a gift from my dad”) and framed photographs of loved ones—Olivia’s boyfriend of eight months, Wilhelmina model Johannes Huebl, dominates the selection. The most prized piece, however, is a dresser from ABC Carpet & Home, which is covered in sparkling costume jewelry. “My aunt [Linda Donahue] is a costume jewelry expert, so I understand it’s just as valuable as real jewelry,” she says, holding up a vintage brooch decorated with enamel and rhinestone lovebirds. “And every piece comes with a rich history. I got this one at the Pier Show in New York, but found an almost identical pin in Leigh Leshner’s book, Vintage Jewelry, A Price and Identification Guide, 1920-1940s. So I think it’s Depression-era.”
With the décor decided on, Olivia concentrated on using the Container Store’s Elfa system to turn the home office into a dream walk-in closet for her well-established wardrobe of vintage finds, plus dresses and separates from Zac Posen, Sass & Bide, Rebecca Taylor, Ports 1961 and Zara, and “a hundred pairs of shoes—from Louboutin and French Sole to lots of no-name heels.”
Although she has a year of media studies at the New School to go, Olivia is ready to take on the acting world. Leaning against the simple, modern white Jonathan Adler desk in her bedroom, she confides, “I don’t have to work—my parents have always supported me in everything I’ve wanted to do—but I want to. I want to be an actress and a brand, and then I want to do some producing.”
To begin her transformation from socialite to international star, the 5'5", size 0 beauty has signed on with the talent agency Untitled (“one of the best in the industry”), as well as hired the PR firm Rogers & Cowan (Elton John’s handler was minding her at this Page Six Magazine shoot).
As for the rumor that she’ll make her acting debut in Whitney Port’s The Hills spin-off, she says reality TV isn’t for her. “I want to be a serious actress,” she says. Then, she’s off to Europe with her boyfriend. “We’ll spend time in Germany, because Johannes is from there,” she says. For fall, it’s back to home, sweet home and college. “Unless I book a job,” Olivia smiles.
My mom called me the other day, excited as ever, to tell me to get on Gilt Groupe as fast as I could to check out bags by a designer names Sylvia Toledano. I quickly listened to her, pulled out my laptop and furiously typed away on the keyboard...
