How a Textile Designer Decorated Her Prewar Upper West Side Apartment

Reported by Vogue.

There is a particular kind of New Yorker who doesn't just want a great apartment — she wants the right apartment, in the right building, on the right block, ideally within walking distance of her parents. Interior designer Sarah Lederman is exactly that person. A lifelong Upper West Sider, she now lives on the same street as her mother and father, and in the same Emery Roth prewar building as her brother. His two boys, her two girls, one storied co-op. "It's like a magical family bubble we've created in this big city," she told Vogue.

For context: Roth's Upper West Side buildings — the San Remo, the Beresford, and the rest of his twin- and triple-towered legacy — are the kind of real estate people put on waiting lists and then quietly obsess over for years. Turnover is rare, co-op boards are legendarily exacting (Madonna was rejected by the San Remo in 1985), and once you're in, you stay. Lederman's duplex follows Roth's original layout: entertaining and living spaces on the first floor, private rooms above, with a clean partition between the adults' side and the kids'. "It's all just very logical," she says. Coming from a designer, that's practically a love letter.

The Home as Laboratory

Lederman didn't gut-renovate — she wallpapered, painted, re-carpeted, and decorated, wrapping the whole project in roughly six months. What makes the result remarkable isn't the speed, though. It's that she was simultaneously building something else: Three Fates, a wallpaper and textile line she launched this past March, named for the mythological weavers of fate and inspired by her own travel obsessions. Bhutan, Morocco, Japan, Peru — wherever she and her husband visit, Lederman photographs patterns in historic homes and mentally files them for future use. The Met and New York City's architectural details fill in the gaps. Each design was first rendered in hand watercolor before being digitally printed, which is exactly why, she notes, the finished wallpaper never reads as flat or mechanical.

The apartment is essentially Three Fates' first editorial shoot and showroom in one. Nearly every pillow is in her fabrics. Two Ward Bennett–inspired swivel chairs are upholstered in her textiles. The powder room wears her green wallpaper. It lives alongside an Art Deco entry rug, an Egyptian woven tapestry above the living room sofa, and custom ceramic lamps with hand-painted shades — and none of it feels like a pitch deck. "When friends come over, they don't even realize this is a newly-launched thing," Lederman says. "The Three Fates patterns just feel so natural in my element." The earthy palette — colors named Sirocco, Amphora (the latter a direct nod to ancient Greek vessels at the Met) — does the work quietly, the way the best interiors always do.

When your home is both your sanctuary and your proof of concept, the pressure to get it right isn't just personal — it's professional, and Lederman makes the case that those two things don't have to be in tension.

Read the original at Vogue.