Ten years ago Derek Lam and his husband and business partner, Jan-Hendrik Schlottmann, paid $4.79 million for a two-bedroom looking over Gramercy Park, then hired a decorator to cover it in honey-colored wood and stuff it with their chic art collection (Kara Walker, Robert Mapplethorpe); the final product was shot by Architectural Digest in 2015.
Those pictures popped up this week in a $3.95 million listing for the unit that didn’t mention their ownership. Neither does a rental listing that uses the same images and appears to have been up for four months now. (The apartment is listed for $24,950 a month, down from the initial ask of $26,900.)
The apartment is on the fifth floor of a unique 2007 building — a stripe of new construction by the architect John Pawson, who had to sandwich it between the 1924 Gramercy Park Hotel and its 1930 annex. Floor-to-ceiling glass windows look over the park along the living room and den, with thick columns of that honey-colored wood between them. The wood extends into cabinetry in a dining room and the kitchen, and travertine in the primary bathroom picks up the same honey-beige color. The exception to all this beige is in the bedroom, which is covered in loud, leafy wallpaper by cult French decorator Madeleine Castaing.
The couple seems to be selling because they no longer live here. Lam closed his namesake line and last year stepped away from his sportswear spin-off, 10 Crosby. This January, the couple told Women’s Wear Daily that they had moved to the Marais in Paris to be closer to a project Schlottman co-founded in 2020, a womenswear label based in Italy called Câllas Milano. Though then again, they could be downsizing: The label is going for luxury — and luxury sales are in a “momentary crisis,” according to a study from Bain.
Or maybe the couple has grown out of the look that appealed to them when they built the Gramercy Park apartment. At the time, speaking to Architectural Digest, Lam described their aesthetic as “impoverished creativity” — a phrase he arrived on when trying to explain a sofa that seemed, to him, “as if a bohemian inherited a nice piece and had just enough cash to get it re-covered.”
