Only Celerie Kemble could gut-renovate and decorate a five-story Manhattan town house in nine months. But let’s start with how she chose the house in the first place. It was 2022; her marriage had ended several years earlier, and Kemble had been renting a place with her three young children, sons Rascal and Wick and daughter Zinnia. She was taking the slow road to buying until her partner, Stephen Roesler, nudged her with a listing of a town house in the often overlooked East Side neighborhood of Murray Hill, just around the corner from the Morgan Library. On paper, it seemed underwhelming—it was unusually narrow in width and not really her style. Even her longtime friend Bronson van Wyck looked at the listing and replied “Jeez, Cel. You don’t want to live in a dollhouse. Twelve feet wide isn’t worth canceling my lunch for.” But Kemble knew she had to start looking, and as besties do, van Wyck showed up. They walked into a well-proportioned, 19th-century Italianate house with high ceilings, original crown moldings, and no less than eight fireplaces. By the time they reached the second floor, he looked at her and said, “Offer full asking.”
And that’s when the work began. Since the ’90s, Kemble has run the New York office of Kemble Interiors, a design firm founded by her mother, Mimi McMakin, in Palm Beach, Florida. Together they are responsible for some of the most beautifully designed houses, private clubs, and hotels on the East Coast. As Kemble tells it, the key to their success is the team of exceptionally talented builders, artisans, and craftspeople that they habitually work with, some for many decades now. When it came to the lightning-fast reinvention of her new home, “We were like the Amish,” she says. “We all came together to raise the barn.”
Her remit to the team—who would help her glaze walls, replicate architectural details, apply copper patina to window frames, and even fit an Italian doorway filled with antique mirror panels around her bedroom fireplace—was feminine but theatrical, old Florida meets Tony Duquette. “I have spent most of my life surrounded by the influence of Addison Mizner and Polly Jessup in Palm Beach, and I can see how that prettiness has hung around in my own style. But I have also studied the work of designers such as Oliver Messel and Joseph Urban, who drew inspiration from stage sets. I wanted to pave the way for the furniture, art, and decorative objects that I had been collecting for this house years before I even found it.” All of it sounds quite formal, and you could excuse someone who grew up in Palm Beach for embracing a more ordered aesthetic, but Kemble’s gift is making her house a welcoming and forgiving environment for three teenagers and an endless stream of houseguests (confession: I am often one of them). “In knocking down the drywall and erasing the clean lines from the existing structure, I wanted the house to feel like the perfection had been wrung out of it, the veneer had been worn away, and that there was no false formality here.”
