If Benjamin were to have had the streetscapes of contemporary Manhattan as his subject, he could probably have crammed the whole effort into a giveaway brochure. What once was an urban landscape characterized by curious and occasionally downright weird shop displays — one thinks of the surreal truss arrangements featured in surgical supply stores — has largely devolved into an unending vista of Chase banks and Walgreens.
It was to counter that trend that Ms. Rheinstein Brodsky, after stints at Ralph Lauren Home and Elle Decor, opened KRB on the Upper East Side in 2014. Three years later, she relocated it a few streets south.
Then, last summer, Ms. Rheinstein Brodsky moved again, this time to a stretch of Lexington Avenue that was long a decorator’s rialto, with a storied lineup of chic shops operated by style arbiters like the antiquarian Louis Bofferding, the interior designer Bunny Williams and Nina Griscom, a legitimately madcap socialite.
Ms. Rheinstein Brodsky commissioned the design team of Bories and Shearron to reimagine the new space, a 1,600-square-foot shoe box, into an eccentric sitting room where she flaunts an approach to design driven by an abiding affection for objects and by the influence of her mother, the interior designer and author Suzanne Rheinstein, who died last week.
“Growing up with my mother, I learned to love rooms and spaces that are deeply layered, filled with a mix of the new and old, the sentimental and antique,” Ms. Rheinstein Brodsky said. Thus, the catholic array of objects at KRB at any given time may include groupings of simple vases by Frances Palmer, warty ceramic frog planters by Jean Roger and Italian neoclassical chairs picked up on buying trips to the antiques fair in Parma, Italy, where Ms. Rheinstein Brodsky also recently scored a “killer” Pierre Lottier table with faux bamboo legs and a marble top resembling a helipad.
“It took me an hour to get up my courage,” Ms. Rheinstein Brodsky said, before she hit miles of dusty aisles in Parma. “It’s intimidating, everyone just sitting there with stuff in trucks, chain smoking cigarettes.”
