Georgia Rules
Shops November 11th, 2009
Georgia Tapert was born in London and moved with her American parents to Manhattan when she was eight. Since then, she’s made a great many treks across more than one ocean.
Tapert, a furniture designer and proprietor of Soho’s Georgia Tapert Living, is a born traveler. She loves taking off for Paris and India (her “number one” favorite) and just about every place in between, in search of inspiration and one-of-a-kind things for her store. In 2004, she spent a few months in Vietnam as a volunteer English teacher. On her way back, she stopped in Phuket—for a single night—when the Indian Ocean tsunami that killed more the 200,000 people hit. After spending 12 hours on the side of a mountain (wearing not much more than the bikini that was all she had left), she was rescued—only to be in India the following year for the Kashmir earthquake, one of the most destructive of all time.
The almost preternaturally poised Tapert takes it all in stride—“It feels like it happened to someone else,” she says—and she remains as intrepid in her approach to style and design as she is in her travels. She fell into the furniture business, for example, when she couldn’t find the right coffee table for her apartment. “I decided just to make one for myself, but by the time it was ready, I was moving, so I put it in the shop.” Since then, she and a partner have started Carolina George, a line that includes an ingenious round table that opens out to become a writing desk and chair, a sleekly modern take on an old-fashioned dressing table, and a dining table with leaves that drop to become a glass-fronted console complete with shelves.
Growing up, she was always interested in design. Her mother, writer Annette Tapert, has written several books on society, fashion, and style; while at Hamilton College, Georgia spent the summers working for the renowned decorator and architect David Easton. After graduating, she went to work with Easton full time, before moving on to stints at Haynes-Roberts and Mica Ertegun at MAC II. “You can go to school and get a degree in interior design or you can go to school by working,” she says. Though she ended up taking a class or two in the history of furniture at the New York School of Interior Design, “just because I love it,” she learned a lot more from her bosses. “With Mica, especially, I traveled a lot and I felt like there were no rules. She was such a risk taker. She’d show me a fabric she planned to pair with a carpet, and I’d think, ‘What is she doing?’ And then it would totally work.”
The same wonderfully surprising juxtapositions abound in Georgia Tapert Living. “I love things that have a story and I love mixing old with new.” Antique paisley and herringbone cashmere throws coexist with handwoven Ethiopian versions from Creative Women. Delicate Moroccan glassware shares shelf space with contemporary colored glasses and silver julep cups she hand-painted with enamel paint. The latter were inspired by a set she spied in the home section of Paris’s Dior boutique, one of her favorite haunts. “They were so beautiful, but they were selling for $700 a cup and I knew I couldn’t sell those in my shop,” she tells me. “So I thought, ‘Well, I ‘ll just buy julep cups and paint them myself. ‘“ The result, like everything else in her shop, is as chic and singular as Georgia herself.
Pictured above: Georgia Tapert seated at the Carolina George School Girl Desk at Georgia Tapert Living; hand-painted silver julep cups; Georgia Tapert Living scented candles
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