This ELLE Decor Editor’s Apartment Is Puttin’ on the Ritz
You see a woman seated in a velvet chair, blonde hair flowing, onyx-blue eyes assessing you, wearing Manolos made for walking from the mansion to the limo, and you draw conclusions. They are wrong. Cynthia Frank is not the empress of the 1 percent. She’s a worker. And at 77, she has no plans to stop working.
You don’t need to see her name on a home-decor spread to recognize her contribution: For half a century, she has celebrated fabulous residences and exquisite rooms in such magazines as Town & Country and ELLE Decor. Which is not to say she is a stylist. Emphatically: “I do not arrange!” What she does do is hard to label, because her career is a sustained exception. When she got her first job, at Harper’s Bazaar, a friend’s advice—“If you tell them you can type, you’ll be a secretary”—produced a novel title: fabric and fur editor.
“I got the job,” she explains, “because I looked the part.”
A few years later, when she was recovering from surgery in Palm Beach, Slim Aarons called. “Put down your orange juice, take your straw hat, and wear all white. I’ll pick you up in 20 minutes,” he said, and off they went to the opening of the Wellington Equestrian Center. Aarons snapped her photograph and sent it to Town & Country’s editor, who asked, “Would she rather have a cover...or go back to work?” Every turn for Cynthia Frank is a star turn. Dominique Browning, her editor at the late House & Garden, remembers her as “a big personality. She has zero tolerance for the mundane and a terrific eye for swellegance.” Years later, Frank styled a Georgia Tapert Howe project for ELLE Decor’s March 2018 issue: “She didn’t think L.A. had good enough flowers,” Howe says, “so she shipped 10 six-foot-long boxes from New York for the shoot—they just kept unloading them off the truck.”
In 1997, she made another idiosyncratic decision: When all three of their children were grown, she and Donald, her neurosurgeon husband, bought a 12-room co-op just off Madison Avenue. “We knew it was large for two,” she says. “It has rooms with no purpose.”
She began the apartment’s transformation by adding moldings to the walls and deaccessioning most of her furniture. Then she went shopping, often at auctions, looking for the velvets and silks, leopard carpets, and crystal chandeliers that would be suitable.
Her aesthetics have been influenced by close friends such as architect Timothy Haynes and interior designer Kevin Roberts, but more often than not, her taste is guided by destiny; when objects speak to her, she buys them. In the living room, a David Hicks sofa, 18th-century chairs, and a vintage Maison Jansen table coexist amiably. Harmony extends to the walls; the blue in the Albert Gleizes painting that hangs over the living room fireplace echoes the velvet of the chairs. Other touches are subtler. A Venetian mirror in a hallway is banded in velvet, a trick she picked up from the Rothschilds.
Personal favorites are more predictable. In Paris, the Ritz. For dinner in Paris, Le Voltaire. Prize possession: a 14.5-carat Asscher diamond. Guilty pleasure: a chicken salad-and-bacon sandwich from William Poll, taken daily.
Her most recent purchase? Oh, that was yesterday, done and dusted; she shops every day. And yet, in her living room, I feel no frenzied shopaholic energy, just over-the-top comfort. Does she? “Yes. When I sit here, I feel I’m in Paris.” Which isn’t to say the apartment is finished. “It will never be done,” she says. “Every time I come back from a shoot, I’m inspired to do something.”
Produced by Cynthia Frank.
This story originally appeared in the December 2019 issue of ELLE Decor.
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