Classic Grandeur in 472 Square Feet
By Joyce Walder
Published: September 6, 2007

GOOD luck finding a phone in the designer Chris Madden’s tiny new Manhattan pied-à-terre. "There ain’t no phone and there never will be," Ms. Madden says, an elocution it is difficult to imagine being used by a certain blond home furnishing design force, whose enormous shadow Ms. Madden can never quite escape. Yes, Ms. Madden concedes, she does have a cell phone, but that is strictly for emergencies and should not somehow diminish the purpose of the apartment.

"I wanted it to be a getaway," explains Ms. Madden, whose primary home is a 3,500-square-foot carriage house in Purchase, N.Y. "No technology, no phone. O.K., there is a TV set, but that was after months of my husband’s begging." And the handset on the wall is an intercom.

If the New York pied-à-terre is traditionally a small space, then the Madden apartment is exceptionally traditional: just 472 square feet. The kitchen, or what there is of a kitchen, is so artfully presented that despite the two gas burners it looks like a well-appointed living room bar, with the 18-inch-wide Miele dishwasher and the half-size Sub-Zero refrigerator hidden behind the custom cabinets. The only ovens are the toaster oven that belonged to Ms. Madden’s late mother and a yet-to-be-used microwave.

Interestingly, Ms. Madden — who heads the design company that bears her name, has a line of home furnishings for J.C. Penney and has been a design correspondent for Oprah — did not design this apartment. It was created by the interior decorator Toni Gallagher, of Rye, N.Y., whose work has been featured in several of Ms. Madden’s home design books.

"I trust and love this woman," Ms. Madden says. "I love her work and also I was too busy. It’s the 30th anniversary of my company. I wanted to give myself a gift.

(A note on that 30th anniversary: It does not refer to Ms. Madden’s design firm, which was incorporated in 1989, but to the moment she left corporate life and moved out on her own.) Ms. Madden is 59, blond, with a personal style so warm and focused that after a while you begin to sweat. She wears a long orange scarf and four or five silver bracelets with her black top and pants. If her conversation were a design it would be a labyrinth, exhaustively detailed. You’d get to your destination eventually, but it would take awhile. Happily, along the way, food would be served. Cookies and fresh raspberries on an antique glass plate. And would you like coffee? No? Mocha? No? Water? Sandwiches? In the inevitable comparisons to Martha Stewart, Chris Madden is presented as the kinder, gentler Martha. "She helps them impress, I help them decompress," she likes to say. Even when Ms. Madden does not give up parts of her secret soul, she raises the expectation that at any moment she might. This creates a kind of faux intimacy, but nicely done, the emotional equivalent of fake age patterns on wood.

I will be honest," she says. "I love creating recipes."

But to the life story, abridged version: Ms. Madden, whose maiden name is Casson, grew up on Long Island in Rockville Centre, daughter of a business executive, second of nine children. After 12 years of Catholic school, she got a scholarship to the Fashion Institute of Technology, which she left three credits shy of graduation to work in the photo department of Sports Illustrated. She was part of a group of women who successfully sued Time Inc., claiming that women were not being promoted. It was also at Time Inc. that she met Kevin Madden, who would go on to become the publisher of House & Garden and today is the president of Chris Madden Inc. They married in 1974.

Three years later, while working as co-director of publicity at Simon & Schuster, after having been led to believe she was getting the top job, she says, came one of those dire corporate moments.

"Someone called me in — she’s passed on so I don’t want to use her name — she was the head director of publicity, which is of course what I thought I was gonna be, and she said, ‘We don’t think you’re powerful enough and that’s what Simon & Schuster is about.’ " She pauses to let the irony of that bit about lack of power sink in. "I say this all the time: I think that was one of the greatest days in my life. It gave me the kick in the pants I needed to follow my own vision."

She formed the public relations firm of Chris Casson Madden Associates, and had two sons, Patrick, now 27, and Nick, now 23. She wrote cookbooks and what-to-feed-your-baby books and design books. The death in 1994 of her younger sister Patty, whose name still prompts her eyes to well with tears, inspired her most successful book: "A Room of Her Own: Women’s Personal Spaces" It is now in its 11th printing.

"I didn’t have a place to mourn her, so I created my own personal space," Ms. Madden says. "It was sort of a yoga meditation space that had been a closet for all those evening gowns that I had to have when Kevin was the publisher of House & Garden. I sold them to someone who had a store for second-hand clothes." She catches herself. "Too much information," she says.

It’s a nice idea, a space of one’s own, and an important one to Ms. Madden, who often lectures to women’s groups on the subject. But space is a luxury to city people.

"Even if you had a one-room studio you could create this," Ms. Madden says. "With a beanbag, a chaise and a basket with what feeds your soul. It could be cookbooks, music, it could be your iPod."

The Maddens’ new first-floor apartment on Beekman Place, one of Manhattan’s most prestigious neighborhoods, goes well beyond such modest comforts, although it does contain cherished items like signed first editions from Philip Roth and Toni Morrison, whom Ms. Madden represented in her publicity days.

The Maddens bought it last December. The purchase price was $600,000, according to New York City Department of Finance records (Ms. Madden said she was "unable" to give the purchase price, though she did stress that it was "well under a million"). It was hardly grand when the Maddens found it. While the living room overlooked the garden, the apartment itself was two plain white boxes. Entering the 280-square-foot living room, the first thing a visitor saw was an off-center wall of mini-size kitchen appliances, covered by a slab of black marble. A dark wood fireplace mantle flanked by dark shelves was at the opposite end of the room. The bedroom was 132 square feet.

Ms. Madden hired Ms. Gallagher for her "hip English country" look. She saw no reason to "harness" Ms. Gallagher to her own line of furnishings, or ask her to design it like the Maddens’ Purchase home, which, while it contains many antiques, also has "J.C. Penney everything, from my towels to my rugs to my bed to my lamps."

The renovation, according to Ms. Madden, cost about $100,000, including the new furnishings. (A number of the pieces came from her Westchester home.) Most of that cost was for custom cabinetry and molding. Ms. Gallagher’s plan for the kitchen area was to disguise it as much as possible.

"I thought the last thing Chris and Kevin were going to be doing was having wonderful dinner parties," Ms. Gallagher says. "It was designed to have a quick bite in the morning, or cocktails."

The existing kitchen appliances were retained and centered against the wall. The old sink was replaced with a small one of hammered nickel. The counter was mahogany. The living room furniture was a high-low mix: a custom sofa bed; two upholstered chairs from the 1950s, which Ms. Madden found in a second-hand shop; a chair from the Althorp collection, based on furnishings from the family home of Diana, Princess of Wales, which cost about $4,000; an antique English library table; one of Ms. Madden’s J.C. Penney pieces, a tufted leather ottoman that sells for $399.

The bedroom is decidedly feminine. A small chandelier hangs over the custom upholstered bed. The most conspicuous countertop is a vanity, with pretty glass perfume bottles.

As for the television Ms. Madden’s husband coveted, it is in a far corner of the living room tucked behind one of the less plush chairs.

How can anyone even see it from there? Ms. Madden is teased.

"Turn the chair around," she says.

One has a feeling that this apartment is a bit of an expansion of the room-of-her-own idea, and Ms. Madden doesn’t dispute that.

"My husband gets a little jealous when I’m here by myself," she says. "It’s a very user-friendly space, especially for a woman alone."