Designers are often featured in magazines, online, and on the runway, but I always wondered, what do the inside of their homes look like? Where do they sleep, eat, spend time with their family, or sketch new ideas? What art do they own? Of all the nooks and crannies in New York, why have they chosen their particular neighborhood? How do they throw parties? What do their closets look like?
Unable to resist my curiosity, I set out to uncover some answers. Our new Home for the Holiday series pulls back the curtain on the personal lives and dwellings of just a few of our CFDA Members.
First stop: Jewelry and accessory designer, Lizzie Fortunato. I was charmed by the outside her brownstone on a tree-lined street in Brooklyn’s Clinton Hill before I even stepped inside. She and her fiancé occupy the top two floors, and if there is a word to describe the home, it is eclectic. Looking around, I noted all of the various objects and art, each individual and unique. Every item had special story behind it — a woven narrative of adventures, relationships, and history.
Fortunato’s home is the kind of place you’d want to spend a rainy day curled up with a good book. With exposed brick and ceiling beams in the bedroom, a couch and coffee table on one end of the kitchen, a picturesque writing desk and a rustic wooden dining table on the other. It’s as if the best items from your favorite antique markets came together to create a cozy and pleasant space.
“I have a piecemeal approach to decorating. I like adopting things,” the designer said of her curated interior style. Each corner of the home — every shelf, wall, and surface — seemed carefully crafted with an array of intriguing pieces, like a painted wooden monkey hanging from a closet doorknob — a gift from her best friend, or a thick woven rope tapestry that she inherited from her grandparents. “I like the idea of making things feel personal,” Fortunato noted. “I got this from a roadside market in Guatemala,” she said, pointing to a small t-shirt framed above the couch in her den. “I saw it and thought, I could make it into something.”
That crafty mentality is what helped steer Fortunato towards her career in jewelry. While at Duke University, she started making pieces out of whatever materials she could get her hands on. “Soon, girls were knocking on my dorm room door asking me to make them something they could wear to a formal,” she recalled.
Years later, after the majority of her college clientele had moved to New York City, the requests kept coming and the designer’s client base exploded. “We make everything in New York,” Fortunato said proudly.
When I ask her what she wants people to feel when they enter her home, she replied, “I want it to feel like it tells a story,” and pointed out that this is the very same approach she takes when designing her namesake line.
