LIZA SHERMAN by Susanna Salk for 1stdibs

Ask Liza Sherman what has helped shaped her style eye over the years and a historical period doesn’t come to mind but rather the colorful flash of a memory from her past: “It was an exotic classmate at Parsons, nicknamed ‘The Dauphin.’ He hung chandeliers in the apple orchards and painted the inside of his mother's house red while she was away one weekend,” recalls Sherman who perpetually has a glint in her eye.

For Sherman, if every picture is worth a thousand words, then her shop is an infinite conversation where memories and design engage like life-long best friends. A favorite professor at Parsons School of Design once told her: “Search the unusual, find the exaggerated,” to which Sherman’s West Village tiny treasure trove is testament to this philosophy. From every corner, everyday objects have been transformed from once being simply useful, to their new role as existing to be simply beautiful. An old farm seeder is ready for its close up as a chandelier, and railroad transport dollies have been scrubbed like dirty schoolboys to become handsome coffee tables. Bathing suits from the 40's have been framed and now sell as art. “I love giving things a second chance at life,” says Sherman. “Look at these gorgeous Belgian mining carts that are now rolling sofas!”

Sherman grew up in Loudonville, New York and majored in French at Vassar. After college, Sherman went on to support herself in New York via modeling. (Malmaison’s Roger Prigent, in his former career as a fashion photographer, used Sherman for test shots.) “On the morning of a shoot for the cover of Harper's Bazaar, (ITALICS) an oven exploded in my face and singed off all my hair, eyelashes, and eyebrows,” recounts Sherman. “This was the end of my modeling career but that was fine with me. It was good money, but I didn't like always thinking about what I looked like.” But she was passionate about the design of things around her. “I come less from an interior design background, but from a more creative one,” says Sherman. “Having always been a painter, I feel very connected to the freedom of the art. My ideal room is Picasso's studio, where the center table was his bronzed goat and the headboard an old Spanish fireplace mantle.” She went on to become an art advisor to major international corporations in the 80's – infusing their boardrooms with African and Native American art. “Once, I put a line of beaded moccasins in Plexiglas boxes that lead right into a corporate dining room,” recalls Sherman. “Those Goldman Sachs men loved it.”

 Sherman hadn’t planned on opening her own store, but when a friend who couldn’t rent out a space in his new business center, Sherman jumped at his offer to do whatever she wanted there. “There we were in our little cubicles with our junk in them,” she says, “and it just went from there.” A shop in Sag Harbor followed before Sherman eventually settled into where she is in Manhattan today. The Bedford Street shop reflects her constant cross-pollination between countries, design, and inspiration. “A friend had to drag me into the Taj Mahal,” says Sherman, “I was dreading it because I thought it would be this tourist trap. But I became so entranced by the patterned inlay of the floors that it became the source for a line of hand-made bone and ebonized furniture we now sell.”  The layered glass chandeliers in the mosques of Turkey further inspired a custom line of hand-blown glass chandeliers.
 “I love the power of object trouve,(ITALIC) says Sherman, “the sense of history is imbued in the objects – my customers get this too!” And they are lucky to have Sherman around to raise the bar when it comes to appreciating the wonderful bounty the world has to offer them, regardless of origin or cost.

After all, this is a woman who understands that a pair of Hungarian bee skeps can be as pleasing to the human eye as to the bee’s.