The new season of Real Housewives of New York promised many delights: a hipper, rebooted cast that more accurately reflected the actual demographics of New York City; whiny husbands vying for camera time; doomed “girls trips”; general bitchiness; Jenna Lyons. The season, which just ended Sunday night, was a bit tame by Housewives standards – no tables were flipped nor prosthetic limbs thrown. The most disturbing incidents happened off-camera. But Bravo fans understand that with a new cast or franchise, the show might take a bit of time to get to the meaty stuff. (There are of course exceptions, like the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, whose casting directors should be afforded honours such as the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a knighthood, or the Légion d’Honneur.)
And there is something that I, as viewer and voyeur, like best about a new edition of Housewives: the real estate. New cast members are obligated to give some kind of tour of their home, usually under the guise of having the ladies over for a get-to-know-you event. In New York, this is especially thrilling. Name a better daytime activity in NYC than walking down a tree-lined street in Brooklyn or uptown and peering into the windows of brownstones, admiring and judging strangers’ tastes in furniture and art. Maybe it’s a miracle I haven’t been arrested for all my spying, but it seems to me to be a rational human impulse – there’s a reason celebrity home tours go viral online every other week. I’m not a Peeping Tom, I’m a Peeping Tom Dixon.
The main attraction, apartment-wise, naturally belongs to the legendary Jenna Lyons (known on the show as Jenna Lyons, or “Jenna Fucking Lyons” – never just Jenna). Lyons, the former president of J. Crew, used to live in a Brooklyn townhouse that was Pinterested relentlessly after it was shot for Domino; the designer once walked into former Prime Minister David Cameron’s London home only to find a complete homage to her own. The spacious SoHo loft shown on RHONY is just as, if not more, influential, a jewel box rife with collectible objects (and shoes).
There’s the pink velvet Milo Baughman sofa, where Lyons’s castmates discussed their “ideal pornography” and ate some passive-aggressive fondue after a fight involving cheese; the original Cy Twombly drawing; the custom brass kitchen counter where her hot bald chef makes said fondue; the edible-looking marble bathroom; the fur-covered bed; the endless walk-in closet filled with nearly 400 pairs of shoes; the chandelier; the leopard poufs; the vintage Playboy printed in Braille. It’s fascinating to see staples of millennial design from their creator; it is clear that The Wing and the Glossier store and countless boutique hotels owe their aesthetic to Lyons, whose versions of now-cliché design codes are so sumptuously beautiful that they still stand out from thousands of pale imitations.
But besides the feast that is the Jenna Lyons palace, the show is otherwise suffering from a famine of beauty. Sure, Ubah Hassan’s home features charming objects she’s collected while working around the world as a model, and Brynn Whitfield’s (tagline: “I love to laugh, but make me mad, and I’ll date your dad”) West Village apartment, unseen on TV but photographed for Domino, has a slightly more human touch, as in it looks like a room at Soho House rather than a bland vacation rental. But otherwise, the places are entirely devoid of personality, all seas of taupe, cream, brown, white, and grey. The aesthetic is proudly Airbnb-core – it is difficult to imagine any people, let alone the cast members’ rambunctious small children, inhabiting these spaces. The only colour comes from giant abstract paintings that look like they were purchased at those random galleries on West Broadway that seem like money laundering operations; one of my notes says “garish stripey painting, vaginal”.
Erin Lichy’s 6,500-square-foot Sag Harbor house, where the other women visit and exhibit terribly ungracious manners, is all white and cream, but she refers to it during a tour as a “great place to trip in”. It is clearly not. The first place I ever tripped was a ramshackle Victorian house in upstate New York covered in clashing floral wallpapers, the plants and bugs fluttering and breathing all night. That was a good place to trip. What would one even see in Erin’s white mansion, or Jessel Taank’s canvas couch-filled Chelsea pad, or Sai de Silva’s minimal Brooklyn brownstone? Don’t get me wrong: these are all well-appointed, expensive, comfortable, clean homes. But I think if I was to consume psychedelic drugs in a single one of them, the lack of colour, brightness, and life would make me pluck my eyes straight from my skull, staining the taupe Parachute linen bedding.
Previous editions of RHONY featured messier people with messier places. Their houses told viewers about their personalities and histories: the dilapidated 63rd Street townhouse that Sonja Morgan spent nearly a decade trying to sell; Dorinda Medley’s 100-year-old Blue Stone Manor in the Berkshires, where Luann smoked, Ramona clogged a toilet, and everyone had numerous indefensible drunken breakdowns; Carole Radziwill’s death trap of a staircase; Leah McSweeney’s more realistic downtown digs. Say what you will about previous casts, but their homes felt like real places, as opposed to apartments staged for potential buyers (which, to be fair, is Lichy’s actual job).
Perhaps as the series goes on and the women become more comfortable, we’ll see something beyond the mass of CB2 bouclé. But for now, I can enjoy la maison du Lyons, and ignore the rest. I have fallen asleep multiple times to her dulcet tones as she explains her most prized possessions to Vogue. I only wish that I could do that in her bathtub.
