Gary and Cathy Wassner’s upstate home.
Photo: Richard Powers
Fawn Galli’s Bold Interiors Create an Unexpected Upstate Backdrop for a Couple’s Lively Art Collection
The modern barn-style retreat in the Catskills disguises ultra-contemporary rooms with striking works by Jim Dine, Alex Katz, and the Campana Brothers
Modern barns abound, but it’s a sure bet there’s only one like Gary and Cathy Wassner’s. Gary, affectionately known as fashion’s fairy godfather and the CEO of Hildun, a financial services company that has smoothed the way for dozens of major brands like Marc Jacobs and Isabel Marant, and Cathy, an artist, do not own muck boots or barn jackets. Nor do they code switch the minute the Catskills fill the horizon on the drive from their apartment in lower Manhattan. No, this is a couple who knows what they like and want to live with, whether surrounded by skyscrapers or a forest stand.
Which is why they turned to Fawn Galli, the New York-based interior designer whose work the couple found bold enough to suit their risk-taking taste when doing up their apartment in the Financial District several years ago. It’s one thing to flex one’s maximalist muscles in a city interior, but it is quite another to pump things up in the mountains made famous by James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving. Indeed, Rip Van Winkle wouldn’t recognize this place.
The living room. Photo: Richard Powers
The original 3,500 square-foot home was “unmemorable apart from the windows,” says Galli. Before she specified the bubblicious pink sitting room sofa by the Campana Brothers or custom designed the flower-power living room rug, though, the Wassners tapped Marica McKeel, founder and principal of Hudson Valley-based Studio MM Architect to figure out how to get them more house. Their three married children and a gaggle of grandchildren are frequent and welcome visitors, so McKeel did what farmers all over the region have been doing for centuries. “They added on to their houses as their needs grew,” she says. “We took our cue from the barn.” Another 3,500 square feet, which houses the primary suite, is connected by a glassed-in breezeway, the whole creating a courtyard surrounding a much-loved pool.
The nod to local vernacular ends at the front door, though. It’s as if Phaedrus, the Greek philosopher, presides: “Things are not always as they seem; the first appearance deceives many.” Give Galli an inch—she describes her clients as zany and freeform—and she’ll go as many extra miles as she can get. There’s no beat up bench, that staple of rustic chic, nor is there an exposed beam in sight. Why choose a sisal stair runner when you can have Alexander McQueen’s hummingbirds flying up the steps? And yes, of course that pink sofa wants a dazzling purple coffee table, one of Jamie Hayon’s Multileg numbers. It all sits on the graphic shards woven into a Pierre Frey area rug.
Laurence Perratzi, Head in the Clouds, (2023). Photo: Richard Powers
Pierre Yovanovitch chairs installed in a home designed by Fawn Galli. Photo: Richard Powers
It might be tempting to ask which came first, the art or the interiors? Galli and the Wassners worked in lockstep: Alex Katz’ Coca Cola Girl 8 looks right at home in the kitchen, itself a bold color field of ebony and cherry red. The Galli-designed sliding doors in the breezeway, their perforations glowing like a Lite Brite, open to a view of Jim Dine’s Two Hearts at Sunset. “All of the art was chosen specifically for these interiors and, true to Gary and Cathy’s spirit, was based on gut instinct,” says Galli.
The Wassners clearly have that in spades. “This was a project that was definitely less structured than most,” she says.
See more images below:
The artist loft features an Oo floor lamp by Eny Lee Parker. Photo: Richard Powers
A bedroom houses a Bocca Lips sofa by Studio 65. Photo: Richard Powers
A bedroom. Photo: Richard Powers
A sitting area. Photo: Richard Powers
Custom concrete table and chairs by Trueform Concrete in the pool house. Photo: Richard Powers
Custom limestone table by Trueform Concrete, Plateau dining chairs by Bonetti-Kozerski, Shape-Up pendant by Roll & Hill in the pool house. Photo: Richard Powers
Cover: Gary and Cathy Wassner’s upstate home.
Photo: Richard Powers
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