Alise O’Brien
John DeGregorio’s sitting on the terrace of his Maryland Plaza condo, leaning back, the sun slanting across his Sicilian features. “I will never forget the day I told my parents I was moving back,” he says “I’d lived away for 20 years, in Washington, London, and New York. But they’re in their eighties, and I just…wanted to be back.”
Fates conspired: The New Jersey pharmaceutical company where Mr. DeGregorio worked as in-house counsel was crammed and asking people to telecommute. He pointed out that he could telecommute just as easily from St. Louis as from Manhattan, and now he’s got the best of both worlds: Every month or so, he flies to New York for a week, takes meetings, meets friends, sees art. And when he buys art, he hangs it on the top floor of a three-story Federal town house in St. Louis.
His parents couldn’t be happier. And altruism handed out rewards Mr. DeGregorio hadn’t even foreseen. “New York is great, but you make sacrifices to live there,” he says. “I wanted to be able to entertain friends and family, but in a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan, I couldn’t. Now I have this really great space, big, with lots of light. And the gym’s across the street, the market’s 20 feet west, there are a couple of dozen restaurants, and I can bike every day in Forest Park.”
He’s also got outdoor space: two decks, teeming with cacti, herbs, and bamboo. (He’s growing his tomatoes in his mother’s garden on The Hill.) “I left the bamboo in pots over the winter, and the stalks froze solid and turned ashen, and I thought I would be the first person in the world to kill bamboo,” he says, grinning at a resurrection that now screens the entire deck.
He’s leaning on pillows made of “amazing colored fabrics I saw in this village in Kenya.” He’d bought yards on impulse and stored them for years in his dark Manhattan apartment. The first thing he did when he bought this condo was have the cloth made into outdoor pillows.
The second thing he did was make choices. “I bought before they were finished with the rehab,” he explains. “I said, ‘I’ll take it, but the condition is, I want to pick out everything. Light fixtures, plumbing fixtures, bedroom carpeting…” Soon he was flipping through marble slabs like a dealer shuffling cards, bent on finding a white with taupe veining to match his cabinetry. “I’d always wanted a white marble countertop,” he says. “So many people tried to talk me out of it, saying, ‘Oh, it will get stained.’ But I stuck to my guns, and I love it, and if it shows a watermark, well, that’s part of living. ‘I lived here.’”
Because he now had triple the space, Mr. DeGregorio also got to go shopping. What he wanted to capture was the feel of a really great apartment in Paris, elegant and sophisticated but comfortable. The house had the right vintage—it was built in 1906—and the architects had worked magic with the floor plan, making the rooms distinct but letting them flow into one another. Again, best of both worlds.
Mr. DeGregorio made the space modern, but artfully so. His bath fixtures are long, squared chrome bars, and a cube’s width at the end rotates to turn the tap on and off, breaking the purity of the line for just a moment. His palette’s minimalist: clean whites and soft grays grounded by matte black, with most of the color coming from the art on the walls. In the living room, a Donald Baechler, courtesy of the William Shearburn Gallery, hangs above a white marble mantel original to the house. On the mantel rest the five silver teardrop shakers Babe Paley gave Truman Capote as a thank-you after the Black and White Ball. (As Capote said, “Babe Paley had only one flaw: she was perfect. Other than that, she was perfect.”)
Next to the white woven-cotton L-shaped sofa stands a marvelous Scottish 19th-century wrought-iron coat rack. “I found it before Christmas, when I lived in London,” Mr. DeGregorio says, “and I said, ‘I’m going home, but I’ll be back in January to pick it up.’ When I went back, they said, ‘You are very lucky. Ralph Fiennes came in and wanted to buy it, and we had to tell him it was sold.’”
He also got lucky finding the safari chairs that sit just beyond the living room, in front of the bay window. “I was on safari, and we’d gotten too close to a herd of elephants that day,” he recalls. “That evening back at the lodge, we drank Sancerre in these beautiful, incredibly comfortable chairs. I asked the manager where I could get them, and he said, ‘Go back into Nairobi. Here’s my card, tell them I sent you.’ They literally made them for me the next day, for $150 each.”
From the seating area, an arched opening leads into Mr. DeGregorio’s den: pearly gray rug, chrome-and-leather Minotti chairs, coral he brought back from Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, a “St. Louis Fly TWA” poster he found in London, a zebra-skin ottoman, an antique silver mirror from France, and a fireplace he designed himself, the surround a white Art Deco ziggurat, elegantly plain.
Windows line the condo, their brightness hushed by transparent black shades. “At first I was just going to leave them bare,” he says, “because I’ll see friends going into Mandarin, or they’ll see me up here and call to urge me to come over. The shades were Dana Romeis’ idea; still transparent, but more finished. She lives over there [he points from the terrace], and she gave me some really great design advice.
“We call ourselves ‘the village,’” he adds, gesturing toward the other houses lining the north side of Maryland Plaza. “In New York, people don’t get to know their neighbors. You are living on top of each other, and you want privacy. Now, not only do I know all my neighbors, but I’ve gone to their weddings and birthday parties.”
He throws his own parties, and his kitchen’s serious, with an espresso machine the size (and with the IQ) of R2-D2; a pantry with its own counter and bookshelf; a sink with a chrome grate in the bottom, sourced in New York; and white bar stools pulled up to the marble counter. In the dining room (which in Manhattan would have been as rare as an indoor pool), a long, dark, austere table by B&B Italia has simple taupe chairs framed in the same dark wood. Above, clear fiber-optic filaments end in a circle of light, the fixture orchestrated by Copenhagen designers Refer + Staer. “I met them in New York,” he says. “The hand-blown glass canopy fixture in the bedroom is their first in North America; I talked them into it.”
The bedroom light illuminates antique nightstands, which were made by Grosfeld House in the late 1930s and later graced the ladies’ room at Bergdorf Goodman, and a British army general’s aluminum traveling chest of drawers with Bakelite handles. The shimmery color of Missoni bed linens is held steady by vintage black-and-white photographs of Italian architecture.
There’s something to study in every room, whether it’s the antique maps of Italy and Spain he found in Budapest; the print of old luggage tags done and signed by Ivan Chermayeff, famous for creating the NBC logo; or the Sheldon Helfman watercolor that reminded Mr. DeGregorio of the street on The Hill where he grew up.
He’s back now.
