Retired investment banker Carl Glick, age 94, sits back in the brown leather Eames Lounge and Ottoman he purchased in 1966.
A family is made up of people, but places and things—the family home, a child’s favorite toy, grandma’s China, mother’s perfume—certainly add context, providing anchors for memories as children grow and life stages flow from one into the next.
For Marianne Rohrlich, these touchstones hold particular significance. A longtime design journalist and style writer specializing in home furnishings, Rohrlich has made her professional life a celebration of these contextual things.
“I’ve written about design for 35 years now, and ‘things’ are very important to me,” she says, perched on a 19th century Ohio courthouse chair, which sits in marked contrast between a leather Soriana chair by Afra and Tobia Scarpa and a Paul McCobb tufted-back sofa in the living room of her Upper West Side apartment. “After my daughter and my son,” she adds, “stuff is my life.”
Rohrlich’s byline, which still appears regularly on the Registry column in The New York Times Sunday Styles section, has been a staple in the Times since 1984, most notably on her long-running “Personal Shopper” column, which introduced readers to countless products and designers over its long run in the paper’s now-defunct Home section.