There are designers who proudly haunt thrift shops and tag sales, but Thomas Hays, an investment banker turned interior designer who has just redone a boutique hotel in Marrakesh, Morocco, is not one of them. High-toned antiques dealers and his own far-flung travels are the source of the treasures in his Chelsea penthouse, and if you’re curious about how much they put him back, Hays, a fellow who is clearly confident in his investment skills, doesn’t mind telling you.
The 18 wooden columns on his two-level terrace — which must be one of the most beautiful rooftop spaces in New York — are from India and Afghanistan and date to the 18th and 19th Centuries. They came from dealers in New York and Denver and totaled $35,000 to $40,000.
That flat, round piece of palest jade with the hole in the center on the downstairs bathroom sink? It’s a bi, a ceremonial piece sometimes found in Chinese burial chambers, and it probably dates to about 2,000 B.C. Hays, a relative newcomer to the design scene who has done about a dozen projects, lingers over it, holding it up to the light, displaying the striations in the jade. He says it was made by hand and came from Throckmorton Fine Art in New York and was $7,000; similar pieces have gone for $70,000 at auction, he says. He moves into the dining area, pointing out what appear to be favorites: two carpets that he says came from the Forbidden City.
The Forbidden City? As in Beijing, and if you weren’t a eunuch or a diplomat it used to be really, really hard to get in? One imagines officials from the Chinese government knocking on the door and leaving with the rugs rolled up under their arms, no matter that Hays, as he is now saying, paid $50,000 and $85,000 a pop.
Do the Chinese know about this? Hays is teased.
Hays does not see any humor here.
“Nothing was taken out anywhere illegally,” he says.
How does he know? “These are bought from a private collection, not taken out of the coffers,” says Hays, who will later explain that the rugs were part of an exhibition at the Danon gallery in New York last spring.
An interjection from his reed-slim blond wife, Marlene Wallace, an actress who joins in the conversation now and then: “There was also a trade in the 19th Century,” she says. “They would give them to ambassadors.”
A bargain
Ready for more? Hays, who turns 46 this month, bought this 2,800-square-foot apartment 10 years ago for $635,000.
And his stuff is so fabulous it should be capitalized: Stuff. A Maria Montez poster encased in a blue and green wooden frame of carved Afghan doors in the den. Eighteenth-century Chinese stone dragons in the gardens. A French Art Deco mirror and wrought-iron day bed. A set of Spanish chairs so old that the person who once reclined in them might have wondered how the Inquisition was coming along.
“The key word is fusion,” Hays says, when asked to describe his style. “I always try to put things together in a way that is unexpected — stone artifacts next to mohair, a gilt bronze next to hand-tooled leather.”
He’s a guy who uses the word gravitas without irony, who had a plasterer flown in from London to do one of the bathrooms, who designed the black wool-crepe Nehru jacket with purple lining he’s wearing and can carry it off.
His discipline is remarkable. When he got off the plane recently from Morocco, where he had just finished turning the Riad Meriem, which he characterizes as a former bed and breakfast, into a boutique hotel, he went straight to the gym.
And as some men were born to lead, Hays, like Lucy in “Peanuts,” was born to direct.
“Two pictures are really good: 001 and 002,” Hays tells this reporter, after a photo shoot she missed. “001 features a really fabulous Khmer piece from Angkor Wat — it’s 11th Century from the Baphuon period, the nicest piece of antiquity I have. It’s a stone carving of a female goddess.”
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Drawn to the arts
Isn’t Angkor Wat one of those places that is losing its treasures like crazy?
“Yeah, but this was before that,” Hays says. “This was in a collection in France for 20 years.”
His own provenance Hays keeps vague. He was born in Germany to German parents, he says, adopted by his mother’s sister and her American husband, an Army officer, when he was 6 and transported to the college town of Ruston, La., and he does not care to go any further. He left Louisiana as soon as possible, getting a master’s in business at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and working as an investment banker for Merrill Lynch in New York and Bankers Trust in London.
But he had always been drawn toward the arts, and after five years he left banking and returned to New York, where he studied at the Parsons design school. He has also developed his parents’ properties in Louisiana, and now has 140 rental units there, which is how he can afford the emperor’s old rugs.
He spotted Wallace in 1992, while she was doing a comedy sketch in an off-Broadway show. She was wearing a red wig and a green boa — a great visual. They married in 2000.
When the couple first saw this apartment, which is on West 23rd Street, not far from a movie theater, it had what they describe as a very ’70s color scheme: McDonald’s red and battleship gray, with mauve carpeting. The large foyer on the first floor of the duplex gave way to a narrow hallway flanked by a kitchen, a bathroom and three small rooms, one of them a Japanese teahouse.
Big and bright
The second floor, which included a bedroom, had no plumbing. The roof was a New York City tar paper roof that leaked. But Hays and Wallace were attracted by the light and space: the large entrance room with its open staircase, the 20-foot ceilings in the center of that room and the two skylights.
The renovations would be done over several years and cost about $900,000 — a figure that does not include the furnishings and plants, which the couple estimate at $1 million. They knocked out the hallway and enlarged the kitchen and bathroom. The old bathroom, which had a red sink and yellow fixtures, was replaced with one with terra-cotta floors, a copper Herbeau sink from France, an open shower and Venetian plaster walls done by that London craftsman.
The most striking parts of the bathroom are the two wood-and-steel doors from southern India, which Hays found in a store in SoHo. Two chains and a metal cross latch remain on them, and the frames are a dark antique wood because Hays did not want a contemporary frame.
“I found a dealer who had a lot of wooden blanks from the Philippines — hand-cut floorboards from the bedroom,” he says. He fondles the smooth wood. “They used to sleep on this. I bought a ton of this wood. In other words, I like to give to everything an organic feel, but not give up what is modern.”
His wife opens a door made of the Philippine wood to expose a washer and dryer, in the manner of a game-show hostess doing the reveal.
The cost of those Indian doors, which Hays jokingly calls the S-and-M doors?
“Around $2,000, but what cost a hell of a lot more than the doors was the labor,” he says. “The wood was $4,000, and by the time we had the whole thing made it segued to about $10,000.”
Exceptional terraces
The small rooms on the entrance floor were opened up to create a very large den that doubles as a guest room. The second floor, which includes the couple’s bedroom and a bathroom, is entirely open, except the closeted toilet. When privacy or darkness is desired, curtains can be drawn around both areas.
The roof terraces, which can be reached from either end of the bedroom, may be the apartment’s most exceptional feature.
“I wanted the garden to feel like a bit of escape, like traveling to another place,” Hays says. “Usually when you see gazebos they use four-by-fours and paint them white. These are much more ornate columns — you can kind of imagine the Raj in Jaipur in the 19th century.”
Construction of the garden took a year. Hays built a second roof a foot above the original one, with steel girders, subway gratings and tiles. The garden is two-tiered, and the 18 wooden columns are the base for pergolas. The two pyramid tops of the original skylights rise out of the deck, their copper seams now blue-green. A small fountain of Italian design is shrouded for winter.
Originally, Hays says, he had ordered a koi pond, carved by hand out of Verona stone in Italy.
“I kept asking them if it was structurally engineered for the roof to hold it and the water,” he says. “After four calls they got tired of talking to me. The cranes showed up at 4 in the morning. I called them up and said, ‘Can you weigh this?’ They made a mistake — it was pounds versus kilos.”
His wife is laughing.
“I remember, Thomas said: ‘Come here, look outside. It looks like a tomb,'” she says.
“It was supposed to be 1,000 pounds,” Hays says. “It was like 2,500 pounds. Then you have to take into account the volume of water.”
What would have happened if Hays hadn’t caught the mistake?
“Thomas would never do something like that,” his wife says.
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