Yesterday, Lainey wrote about Johnny Depp’s apartment/expensive torture chamber. It’s a lot of sharp corners, cracks and brightly painted walls, basically my nightmare.
The antidote to that? Meg Ryan’s New York loft, featured in November’s Architectural Digest (via PEOPLE). At first glance, I immediately thought of Kathleen Kelly’s Upper West Side brownstone in You’ve Got Mail. Remember her apartment, and her bookstore? The look was lived-in but sophisticated – you could definitely leave a cup of tea on the bedside or throw your coat over a chair without feeling like you are trashing the place. The details - industrial lights from Maine, floor-to-ceiling bed curtains, tufted ottomans, huge custom-made area rugs, marble double vanity sinks – give Meg’s new apartment that same homey feel (even though you can bet they were hella expensive).
Meg’s new home (it’s her 9th renovation, which is interesting as most people think renovating is a mini version of hell) is different than Johnny’s, or Gwyneth’s (which I wrote about here) because she actually lives in it. This isn’t a spread to help market the place to prospective buyers.
So that’s why when she talks about reclaimed furniture and collecting buttons from the floorboard and the history of the place, it isn’t eye roll-inducing. The apartment is staged for this shoot (no one has that many photos casually propped against walls) but it’s not so aggressively “put together” that you get the feeling no one has ever taken a shower in the bathroom or slept in a bed.
The feature isn’t just to show off her crib – she’s also promoting her directorial debut for Ithica. To be honest, I hadn’t heard of the movie and had to look up reviews (which are wildly uneven). At 54, Meg Ryan is over America’s Sweetheart, and probably really over people talking about her face. She’s directing, she’s a little more public, she’s letting people into her home (on her terms).
Oh and John Mellencamp scored the film. He also painted a portrait of Meg that hangs prominently in her living room. Is there a such thing as Ex feng shui?
Click here to see more of Meg’s home in Architectural Digest.
