When Syrie Moskowitz reflects on her first memory of interior design, it isn’t just one memory that comes to mind. Rather, it’s a wash of memories from an entire childhood spent between various Victorian homes, which her parents would purchase, restore, decorate and flip. “This definitely impacted my aesthetic,” explains the multi-disciplinary visual artist, who’s relaxed and radiant as she FaceTimes me from her home art studio.
“[My mother’s aesthetic] was not a dissimilar aesthetic to what I have, although hers is much more classically Victorian.”
Looking at Moskowitz’s home, which she shares with her husband, musician and music producer, Stuart Matthewman, alongside their four very fluffy cats, you might first assume that she too lives in a classically renovated Victorian house, overflowing with beautiful antiques. But it’s actually far more unique: an Arts and Crafts jewel, situated a few blocks from Prospect Park, which she miraculously found online with a serendipitous slip of her computer mouse. “After the first showing we were like, Oh yeah, this is our bananas house.”
It’s the way that she’s devoted herself to decorating it which really makes this home inimitable. The majority of the wall hangings, wall stencils and even a hand-painted mural which fills an entire room, were at least in part administered by Moskowitz herself. Thanks in part to the pandemic’s forced downtime, Moskowitz was able to get to work. “I was here, and all I could do was strip walls, strip things, and repair things.”
Moskowitz’s style is a mash-up of contrasts: maximalist and refined, grounded and ethereal, classical and unpredictable, contradictory and full of harmony.
“I don’t like heavy drapes. I don’t like a lot of overwhelming textile elements. I like the Arts and Crafts era, and Elizabethan and Jacobean influences. I like heavy wood, oaks, and solid furniture…I like a nice, dark room,” she explains.
What Moskowitz really craves when creating a space isn’t a look, era or aesthetic, though; it’s a feeling.
“Part of my aesthetic in interiors is actually comfort and security. I feel safe with multitudes - with having more items that speak to me.”
Her home certainly acts as a comforting embrace as well as an entry point to another world: her own private domain in which she makes and creates from scratch all day. Moskowitz has been spending a lot of time painting, of late—though the term 'painting' is somewhat of an understatement when it comes to describing her art practice. Naturally, she couldn’t just work with any old paints found on a shop shelf; instead, she literally makes her own paints from scratch, using a traditional recipe for watercolors of honey, gum arabic and pigments imported from all over the world, from France to Armenia. “I can’t do anything the easy way because I love process.”
The embracing feeling her home creates doesn’t stop with the house itself; instead, it really sings just beyond its four walls, in what her friends have named the “Sleeping Beauty Garden."
When Moskowitz and Matthewman first moved into the house in 2019, it was surrounded by dried-up lawn, shrubs and a dead tree. She soon got to work, replacing the top soil before digging in with her own bare hands. Now the home is surrounded by 106 varieties of roses, many of them rare and antique kinds. As she designed the garden she deliberately set up the color scheme like a painting, starting with pastels, followed by bursts of burgundy and oranges, leading onto stronger pinks and purples. Other plants which fill the space bear apples, raspberries and figs. Between the roses, fruit trees and other perennials, the once barren garden is now full to the brim and blooms from February to December. The effect is almost like a William Morris - one of her Arts & Crafts role models’ - work coming to life.
Moskowitz, who worked as an artist’s model for many years, has found her own muse in her home and garden. Further to that, she has found many muses in her many roses. In fact, she is a sort of living rose herself, forever floating around in a sensual silk slip, yet she also has a clear sense of grit, structure and seasons to her.
“I think there’s a safety in a rose, especially as a woman. You look at a rose and think it’s so beautiful, it smells so good, but then some people say they don’t want to grow roses because they’re sharp and they’ve got spikes,” she says, before continuing. “It’s like people just want the bloom without the work.”
Moskowitz says her favorite time of year in the garden is the winter when she can see the structure of all the roses properly. It makes sense, coming from someone who seeks out spaces with good bones and a solid foundation before, slowly but surely, rendering them her own. It’s all part of the process she enjoys so thoroughly: first the work, then the bloom.
