A 19th-century American mahogany table in the dining room seats up to 16 (with leafs). Over the mantel hangs a 19th-century bull mirror. Framed prints include scenes from Lucca, Italy, where Warner Johnson spent many idyllic vacations at a friend’s villa.
Greeting a noontime guest with platters of chicken, pork, plantains and a bottle of white wine, entrepreneur Warner Johnson declares: “I’m a Southerner! I couldn’t invite someone to my home without serving lunch!”
His sprawling, airy five-bedroom Harlem apartment—2,800 square feet with 11-foot-high ceilings and four working fireplaces, in a building built by the Astor family at the turn of the 20th century—is infused with the gracious ease of his native Raleigh, North Carolina, along with infl uences from other parts of Johnson’s peripatetic existence, which includes a year and a half in Paris after getting his start on Wall Street. In France Johnson discovered a common theme between Southern style and casual European elegance: the tendency to intermingle periods, mix high and low and combine heirlooms with thrift-store finds.
“My grandmother lived in a 1920s house, and I’d see the way things were lit and placed,” recalls Johnson. “And then in the early ’90s, I was fortunate enough to spend weekends in the French countryside, where I’d see family pieces filling some big old pile of a house. It’s a style that’s thrown together, but it works. It’s accidental but it all comes together and it’s quite lovely.”
But before he became a connoisseur of good taste, Johnson experienced life in the aesthetic mainstream. “Growing up, I lived in a house done in high-60s style, which meant everything you could hope for at that point in time: central air conditioning, wallto- wall carpeting, a basement with an air-hockey table,” he says. “It was like The Brady Bunch.”
Nary a trace of mid-century mod remains in the 47-year-old’s current abode, where rooms, like carefully constructed, colorful sets, tread a fi ne line between the noble and the casual, the upright and the offhand. It’s a home where an imperial Chinese yellow foyer showcases a series of 200-year-old plates illustrated with scenes from allegorical fables; where a Directoire-style sofa in the living room faces two Anglo-Indian rattan chairs covered with leopard-print cushions; where fl oor-to-ceiling windows with balconies lend grandeur; and where a guest bedroom is painted a hue called Roman Shade, which can be found on the walls of the lobby of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
FROM LEFT: The centerpiece of the game room is a pool table purchased at a New York flea market. “To move it cost more than the table itself,” says Warner Johnson. Behind the pool table stands a screen fashioned out of ceiling tiles from a 1930s Art Deco-style home; a portrait of Johnson;The entryway, painted an imperial Chinese yellow, was originally too bright: “It looked like a taxi stand,” says Johnson, “so I toned down the color with a gray trim.” The walls are lined with French plates featuring scenes from allegorical fables. A Chinese wedding banquette (a fl ea-market find) is topped with paintedwood obelisks. The American side chairs were bought in upstate
“Warner is a Southern gentleman who has traveled the world,” says interior designer Elaine Griffin, a longtime friend. “He has a brilliant eye, a confident eye, and answers only to himself. That’s so rare to see. He’s his own vetting committee. His choices are all over the map, but they’re flawless.”
While the apartment appears to lean toward the formal and orderly—with a proper dining room and velvet-upholstered chairs in the living room—look closely and you’ll find inventive, surprising décor flourishes like the steel geometric art in the hallway that could be straight out of MoMA but is actually a metalworker’s cutout that Johnson bought for $120 in a Hudson antiques shop. While a framed portrait that once belonged to Malcolm Forbes is deposited casually on the living room mantel, a Pollock-like abstract painting by José, Johnson’s building super, hangs on the bedroom wall. “I went to the basement trying to find him one day, and he had a drop cloth hanging there,” Johnson explains. “I paid him $30 for the painting, and had it professionally stretched. I love it when my friends who are art buyers say, ‘That’s a true drip painting.’ It’s accidental art.”
Creativity fuels Johnson, both at work and at home. “I’m so happy to have a home that’s a welcoming environment where I can let my ideas just flow,” he says. Currently launching a telephone company called Freephone2phone (about which he explains, “You’ll be able to pick up your phone, dial a local number and then make a free call up to 12 minutes anywhere in the US or 30 countries. The only caveat is that you have to listen to a 10-second ad, and the ad pays for the calls.”) and overseeing a luxury travel and nightlife website called fabsearch.com, Johnson begins his days at 6 AM, fuelled by the promise of a fresh start and an endless drive to innovate. “I have big vision, I have big ideas,” he says. “I think my home is an extension of that.”
