For 14 months, Athena Calderone ping-ponged between coasts East and West, and further off to Copenhagen and Lyon, with photographer Nicole Franzen in tow to shoot a collection of tastemaking homes for her latest book, Live Beautiful. By the end of it, she was left with design-magazine-cover-worthy interior photography, but also, a selection of images of her standing in, of all places, a bathroom shower with the various homeowners.
“I was looking at all of the behind-the-scenes photos that my assistant had taken and there were all of these images of me in somebody's shower,” she recalls with amusement, listing all the documented times she needed to step out of the shot and take cover beneath a showerhead with Jenna Lyons, Nate Burkus, and Kearnon O'Molony. “It tickles me because there are these strange moments you find yourself in.” The candid snapshots speak not only to Calderone’s familiarity with many of the homeowners but also the lengths she’ll go to to get the shot.
Calderone is part of the rare breed of influencer (her Instagram account @EyeSwoon has garnered over 270,000 followers, with even more visits to her website of the same name) whose appeal transcends the blogger-sphere. In 2017, she was able to reverse engineer her brand from digital to print with her first publication, a book of recipes named Cook Beautiful, which was by every measure a success. “I wanted something that had this level of permanence to it,” she says.
A student of interior design, Calderone launched her website EyeSwoon in 2011 as a place to disseminate original photography of her tablescapes, meals, and her at-home life. She now has disciples who home-make à la Athena, carrying their netted bags to the farmers market, lighting their homes with Edison bulbs, and filling their dinner tables with just-gathered-in-the meadow-style floral arrangements. From her headquarters in Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill neighborhood she cooks, hosts, and documents it all like a Martha Stewart for the Millennial-minded.
The townhouse, which brims with an eclectic assemblage of belongings (a floor-to-ceiling Baroque gilt mirror in the living rooms catches the reflection of a sleek veiny, marble coffee table) is featured in the book, as is the summer home Calderone shares with her DJ-husband Victor and teenage son Jivan. The latter comes together like a symphony of oatmeal and putty colors—a property more Montauk moderne than beach house.
Following an introduction by Calderone’s close friend and Architectural Digest editor in chief Amy Astley, there are over a dozen other examples of domestic bliss. There’s the Beverly Hills mid-century bungalow (by seminal architect Rudolph M. Schindler) belonging to Pamela Shamshiri (formerly of Commune) that’s filled with high-design pieces without a trace of pretension. And there’s the East Village townhouse that Webster founder Laure Hériard Dubreuil shares with her son and husband, populated with red velvet slipper chairs and nude figure paintings—a very francophile family home. Jenna Lyons, Stephen Alesch and Robin Standefer (of Roman and Williams), and Vanessa Alexander also opened their doors up to Calderone.
Scattered throughout the book, which is broken down by property, are Calderone’s takeaways and highlights. Culled from interviews with homeowners, the texts go beyond a decorator’s tricks of the trade. Rather, Calderone spotlights those quotidian, mundane details that transform a house into a home. For Nate Berkus, she describes how he “loves to see ring marks on his marble countertops because it shows life, it's like a remembrance of his daughter sitting with her orange juice at the counter.” Lyons echoes his sentiment with the floors of her SoHo loft, which were left unfinished and unstained to show “the pitter-patter of her son running about and the path that he takes every day.”
It all harks back to Calderone’s dedication to design that doesn’t take itself too seriously. “I can't even tell you how many Instagram DMs I get with people asking me about my marble kitchen. Is that actual marble? Is that a fake material? Do you care about staining?” Her much-given response is to simply just embrace it. “Hopefully, people can start to find beauty in the imperfection.”
