This article originally appeared in the March 2003 issue of Architectural Digest.
In his professional life, Michael Imperioli is a master of brooding and menace who projects the wounded machismo of a dark James Dean. He is probably best known as Christopher Moltisanti, the nephew of Tony Soprano on the award-winning HBO series, for which he has written several episodes, and his work gives depth to an edgy delinquent who has lately been struggling with a heroin addiction. He has also appeared in some 30 films, many of them gritty. One should always be wary, however, of confusing an actor with his persona. It takes discipline to portray inner chaos and refinement to understand brutality. A story told about Sir Laurence Olivier nicely sums up that paradox. When a costar asked him how he made the Nazi killer he played in Marathon Man so convincing, he supposedly replied, “I pretend.”
Four years ago Imperioli and his Russian-born wife, Victoria, moved with their children, Isabella and Vadim, from what he describes as “a midtown triplex with serious design flaws” to a 19th-century factory building in Tribeca. It was raw space in the way that the hardy pioneers of downtown real estate once used that expression: not a developer’s white shell with a DSL connection and risers ready for the installation of a spa, but as daunting a wreck as the character of Chris, each dark floor a narrow bowling alley with warped lintels and grime-covered beams. The rear windows opened to a brick wall, and no one but Victoria Imperioli perceived the property’s potential for redemption as a town house of dramatic—even operatic—splendor.
Yet one should note that there are no divas at Casa Imperioli: It’s the home of a hardworking couple who dislike celebrity trappings and who own a popular bohemian bar in Chelsea. Michael is a passionate chef who collects books on gastronomy and frequently cooks gourmet dinners for friends, and he works on his screenplays in a study whose mahogany shelves are filled with serious fiction. Victoria, who last year opened her own design firm, SVE New York, with her business partner, Sonya Chang, studied philosophy and German in Munich before taking up art history at Parsons and The New School. She gives the impression that nothing would intimidate her. “I love getting dirty,” she says with a smile. Her husband agrees: “I think she’s happiest doing demo—and I mean slinging the hammer.” Imperioli himself is familiar with dirty business. (As Chris likes to say of the Sopranos, “Garbage is our bread and butter.”) So there was no question for either of them of wimping out and moving to a hotel while their future home was gutted. They camped on the top floor.
The couple’s baby Vadim was already toddling and the job wasn’t quite finished on the morning of September 11, 2001, when the World Trade Center collapsed just a few blocks away, trapping the family at home in the dust cloud. Their neighborhood has since recovered much of its vibrance, but the blankness of the sky where the two great towers once cast their shadows is a constant reminder of all that was erased that day.
Michael Imperioli may understand murderous violence more intimately than most civilians, but, he says, “I never bring the acting home.” And home is about as far—spiritually and aesthetically—from Sopranoland as one can travel while residing a convenient limo or subway ride from the flatlands of New Jersey where the action takes place and the soundstage in Queens where the interiors are filmed. “I’m very sensitive to the ethics of design,” Victoria Imperioli notes in her throaty Russian mezzo. “The work is about generosity, about creating harmony and pleasure, not about expressing a designer’s personality at the expense of a family’s comfort. I’m not hung up on the price of things or their provenance. I’m an obsessive reupholsterer, and I love recycling furniture or light fixtures I find at flea markets. This renovation took so long in part because I work intuitively and physically, not rationally, building up layers of feeling and listening to the architecture.”
The Imperiolis’ landmark building was erected when Tribeca was Manhattan’s commercial hub—the city’s produce, shipping and textile center. “The Second Empire period has a certain masculinity,” Victoria Imperioli continues, “and I tried to incorporate that into the design. Our floors don’t have the openness of the industrial lofts that were built uptown a little later. But you can really condense the mood in a smaller space, and I wanted to give the interiors a classical patina appropriate to the façade, with a rich overlay of textures and a Second Empire palette. Green organizes your thoughts, red entices you, yellow is an antidote for dead space, blue is for dreaming, and if you meditate on it, even emptiness has a color.”
The house has the aura of a very small and plush family palazzo, perhaps in some ancient Sicilian hill town, an impression heightened by Victoria Imperioli’s antipathy to “naked walls” and her collection of 17th- to 19th-century European art. The floors still have a slight list—few of the angles in the house are perfectly regular—and as in an Old World salon, the furniture is pushed against the opulent silk-damask-covered walls of the main rooms. “We can rearrange the chairs and divans as we need to,” she says, “but with this configuration, there’s an unbroken expanse of space for play and entertaining.”
While sleeping quarters weren’t an afterthought, they were approached like the cozy “private cabinets” of a drafty old mansion. The master bedroom has been tucked into what Victoria Imperioli describes as a “jewel box” alcove off the living room, and the children (Isabella and Vadim now have a baby brother, David) retire to their own yachtlike loft beds off the music room on the top floor. The boys have been treated to a painted ceiling. “The baby is always pointing at something overhead,” says Victoria Imperioli. “He seems fascinated by all the decorative detail.” Her father, Ryczard Chlebowski, is the master artisan responsible for much of it: He did the custom paneling and moldings throughout the house and is collaborating with his daughter and Sonya Chang on the renovation of a theater in Chelsea where the Imperiolis are considering establishing an ensemble company.
In the meantime, Michael Imperioli has adapted Mario Puzo’s novel Omerta as a feature. “I find writing a lot harder and a lot riskier than acting,” he admits. “As an actor, you always have a road map—your script. As a writer, I’m never sure of my direction. But Victoria has made my study a secure place to think.” His wife acknowledges his gratitude with a flash of her dark eyes: “When a house fulfills not only the needs but the fantasies of the people who inhabit it, they want to stay home.”
