Cathy Hardwick Downsizing Mario Buatta-Designed Apartment With Help From Sotheby’s Home
ARTISTIC HOLDINGS: Designer Cathy Hardwick has turned to Sotheby’s Home to lessen her possessions.
The 100 lots of her home decor include furniture, paintings, sculpture, lighting, porcelain and bric-a-brac. Having lived in a Beaux-Arts building at 417 Park Avenue since the early Eighties, Hardwick is downsizing. Her apartment was designed by her interior decorator friend Mario Buatta.
The at-home designer of choice for many well-heeled movers and shakers, Buatta died in 2018. But interest in his inside jobs, so to speak, hasn’t waned as of late. In January, Sotheby’s staged a sale for the interior decorator’s “legendary assemblage” that racked up more than $7.6 million — well over double its high estimate.
The assortment went online at the e-commerce site of Sotheby’s Home during the week of Sept. 7, according to a Sotheby’s Home spokeswoman. The Upper East Side auction house planned to announce the collector as Hardwick on Tuesday with a blog post about the designer, she said.
For a little more intel about Hardwick’s home, there will be insights from a few of her friends in the fashion world — designer and chairman of the Council of Fashion Designers of America Tom Ford, stylist Patricia Field and designer Adrienne Vittadini.
Ford once said, “The thing about the apartment was that all of the objects, furnishing, drapes and pictures sat so perfectly together that what I remember the most was the seamless-ness of it all. No one particular object jumped out. The rooms were a kind of frame for their inhabitants.”
He and Hardwick have a long and cherished history. She first hired Ford in the fall of 1986, and his first visit to her apartment around that time was to help Buatta hang some pictures. Hardwick later introduced Ford to Richard Buckley, whom the designer has been with for decades.
An inveterate entertainer, Hardwick has always enjoyed cooking and baking. Buatta was among her dinner guests and she sometimes brought her culinary specialties or international finds from work trips to Italy to his house.
In a Q&A provided to WWD, Fields described the decor in Hardwick’s apartment as “chic, warm and inviting with many well-chosen pieces.”
A Mottahedeh partial dinner and dessert service is listed at $3,500, Marie Amalia’s “Les Ballons Bleus,” a late 20th-century painting at $1,450, a European architectural early 19th-century mirror at $950, a Regency convex Girandole mirror from that same time period at $995 and Charlotte Horstmann Ming style low tables at $400 are among the offerings.
To drum up interest in the selection from Hardwick, an e-mail will be sent to Sotheby’s Home clients later this week.
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