Then the fun began. Victory, a fashion designer and
illustrator who began working for Ralph Lauren around
that same time, waded in quite calmly. “When I first
bought my condo, I went full on, did this, did that. When
I got this house, I decided, ‘I’ll live in the space until it
tells me what it needs to be,’” she says. Beginning with the
garden-level front bedroom, whose outstanding feature
is glorious wood wainscoting but which, like the other
rooms, was “a hot mess” swathed in wall-to-wall carpeting,
she gradually made the place livable, with the help of
a few fortuitous recommendations.
“Someone told me about a woman named Betty James
from the island of Saint Vincent, who strips wood. I said,
‘Can I work alongside you?’ She taught me how to do it
with Zip Strip and a heat gun,’” Victory says, until all the
woodwork, including some exceptionally finicky, twisty
bits of fretwork, was returned to its natural essence, needing
no additional stain or finish.
The plaster situation was even more of a challenge. “So
much of the plaster was cracking, at times I wanted to
scrape it all off and go with Sheetrock,” Victory says.
A turning point came when her plumber mentioned
that he knew “an amazing plaster guy.” Raul Agrippa of
Brooklyn-based Agrippa Plasterers “camped out in this
house for a year, while I lived with scaffolding and dust.”
The work has continued in fits and starts for a decade and
a half, pending available funds and craftspeople. “It’s not
yet complete,” Victory says. “The living room ceiling and
the entry are still to be done.”
Agrippa’s methodology has been to first clean and document
the original bas-relief detail. After creating new,
smooth surfaces with modern materials, he re-creates the
damaged ornament. There have been disasters along the
way, to be sure. An electrician using a buzzing saw was “so
aggressive with his machinery that the vibration shook
half the kitchen ceiling, including the medallion, to the
floor,” Victory says. “I gathered up the pieces and Raul put
it all back together, like Humpty Dumpty.”
A couple of years ago, when Victory laid a new
herringbone-pattern white oak floor throughout the
parlor level, the existing Ikea kitchen at the rear “fell
apart.” She had just started to remodel the old kitchen
when COVID-19 hit, interrupting her plans.
Victory’s kitchen may be rudimentary at the moment,
but it is a grandly proportioned, south-facing space, with
an adjacent new half-bath in a closet formerly occupied
by a dumbwaiter. It serves for cooking the dishes Victory
loves from her parents’ native Trinidad, but mostly it’s
a greenhouse for a collection of thriving houseplants. “I
have embraced my green thumb,” she says. It’s but one
45
A ghostly ceramic hand by Harry Allen from Areaware surprises
in the powder room, a petite space that formerly housed a
dumbwaiter. “I love small rooms being painted in dark colors,”
says Victory. “You can’t make it bigger, so you may as well
make it feel like a jewel box.”