This year, Rebecca Hessel Cohen celebrates 10 years since she launched her ultrafeminine super-maximalist clothing and lifestyle business, LoveShackFancy. Frilly and floral, the hugely popular brand is a wildly unabashed ode to romanticism in a current design environment that so often equates elegance with minimalism and great taste with 50 shades of wan. It should come as no surprise, then, that when she and her husband, Todd Cohen (also her business partner), took on a West Village town house renovation for their family over five years ago, their adventure was nothing short of an epic love story filled with passion, indulgence, and obsession. One need only consider the home’s 154 antique decorative light fixtures to understand the monumental scope of it all.
The couple, both native New Yorkers from the Upper East Side, had been renting a town house, as new parents, in the neighborhood for a few years when they came across their dream home. “It was a total shell,” recalls Hessel Cohen. “But when I first walked through it and then out to the carriage house in the back—which was the most magnificent thing I’ve ever seen in New York City—I was like, ‘I don’t know what we need to do, but we need to grab this house.’”
Grab they did, and Cohen soon started in on the renovations. “I had built new buildings before,” he says, noting that he develops real estate in addition to working alongside his wife. “But I’d never done anything of this scale—for my loved ones. I didn’t realize how intense it all would be.” On his immediate to-do list: Connect the carriage house to the main structure, install a new staircase, and create a new basement. “The house dates from the late 1800s,” he says, “so you just had to have the nerve to go through with all those changes.”
The couple kicked off plans with the Paris-based design firm Gilles & Boissier, whose architectural designs for the renovation were a chic blend of modern and traditional. “We worked with them to bring in the Parisian aesthetic,” says Hessel Cohen. “We both love all those Haussmannian homes. And through our travels, we knew we always wanted to have a European influence in our home in New York City.”
