The architects of WORKac build designer Diane von Furstenberg an unconventional home next to the High Line—the city oasis she helped create
One of the great luxuries of life is a getaway that keeps clamor and chaos at a distance. Fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg’s live/work space in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District—a glass-and-steel aerie the occupant calls her “tree house”—appears to be just that. But the isolation of the lofty perch is deceiving. Just beyond its transparent walls the city’s icons, old and new, shout for attention: to the northeast the majestic Empire State Building, and to the west the High Line, a mile-and-a-half-long park built atop abandoned elevated train tracks and of which Von Furstenberg was an early champion. And all around is an edgy, effervescent quarter exuding equal parts glamour and grit.
“Everybody told me when I came to this neighborhood that I was crazy—that it was full of drag queens, that it smelled awful because of all the butchers,” says the Brussels-born designer, who moved to New York in 1969 with her first husband, Fiat scion Prince Egon von Furstenberg. (They had two children, and divorced in 1983; in 2001 she married media mogul Barry Diller.) “All of that is true,” she continues.
via@architecturaldigest
