When artist Vivan Reiss, as she puts it, “de-married” and moved back to New York from Toronto, she bought this circa-1850 Murray Hill brownstone and made it her own playground. “I had this idea of a Gustavian color palette,” she says. “Not that it had anything really to do with the house. But that’s what I thought. There is a lot of pink in the house, which might seem like kind of yuck, but it’s not.” Elsewhere, her dining table “is in the shape of a roast chicken. So here are the drumsticks, and that’s the tail, the neck, and the wings.” She painted the front of the fridge with trompe l’oeil food. “I was thinking, I am not a neat person. You don’t want to look inside my refrigerator, but wouldn’t it be great if you had the illusion of looking inside?”
