Kim Stolz

Article about Kim Stolz and her apartment in the NYT




IF SHE LOOKS FAMILIAR ... Kim Stolz, a model and aspiring law school student, among other things, at home on East 84th Street.



The décor is more or less unchanged, but she is gradually making her mark.



NESTER Kim Stolz lives in the apartment that was her father's in his bachelor days and her family's when she was growing up.



KIM STOLZ, a green-eyed brunette whose résumé includes a star turn on "America's Next Top Model" as well as a stint at a major New York law firm, lives in an Upper East Side apartment that embodies the geography of her childhood.

It was in this two-bedroom penthouse aerie on East 84th Street, near Third Avenue, that Ms. Stolz, now 26, used to slide across the parquet floor in her socks when she was 5. It was in the living room that she gazed into the angled mirrors on the walls and saw her reflection repeated again and again, a slightly disconcerting experience for an only child.

And it was at age 16, standing by the living room couch, that Ms. Stolz informed her parents that she was gay. It was, she recalled the other day - sitting just feet from where she had stood on that occasion - the most emotional experience of her young life.

Ms. Stolz, the daughter of a stockbroker (her father worked at Goldman Sachs) and a supermodel (Carol Brandt, who modeled for Givenchy and Ralph Lauren), is a member of a small and exclusive club of New Yorkers, those who continue to live in the place where they grew up long after reaching adulthood.

On the one hand, remaining in such a setting can help reawaken the traumas of childhood. But it often means that a person lives better and more reasonably than would be possible otherwise.

In many respects, Ms. Stolz had a typical Upper East Side childhood; she attended the Brearley School from kindergarten through 12th grade. The month she graduated from high school, her parents moved to London, making the apartment hers during her years at Wesleyan, where she majored in government with a concentration in international politics.

And now, after a brief interlude in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, in a one-bedroom with cockroaches and no air-conditioning, Ms. Stolz is back in the 21-story white brick building where she has spent nearly her entire life. (The apartment, by the way, is legally hers, turned over to her by her parents, who returned to the United States in 2005 and lived for a time a few blocks away.)

In recent years, she has had some interesting adventures. Though she always assumed that after college she would go to law school or work in the field of foreign policy, she went to a "Top Model" audition after losing a bet with a friend; this was followed by work as a model.

But now she is eager to get back onto her original track. Her college major and the job with Holland & Knight, where she worked as a paralegal after the filming of "Top Model," whetted her appetite for more serious pursuits. She is applying to law school and working on a book about the impact on her generation of social networking sites, Twitter and reality television. (She is glad when people Twitter her at @kimmystolz, noting that it's great for her research.)

Much in the apartment is different from the way it was when she was young. The grand piano she played as a child is gone, and there's a 47-inch flat-screen TV, as befits a tenant whose résumé features stints as a correspondent for MTV news and a host of the channel's video music awards pre-show.

Other new additions include a poster for "Top Model," in which Ms. Stolz came in fifth in Season 5, broadcast in the fall of 2005.

The furnishings in her bedroom, formerly her parents', include an armoire ($150 from Housing Works) that has seen better days. Her childhood bedroom is now occupied by her roommate, Erin Reiss, a social work student.

But the sweeping view from the living-room window, which faces south and overlooks a broad swath of Midtown Manhattan, is as dazzling as ever, especially at night. The rugs in the living room and the foyer are the ones Ms. Stolz remembers from her childhood. The majesty palm in a corner of the living room arrived with her father when he moved in as a bachelor in 1978.

The galley kitchen is so unchanged that Ms. Stolz sometimes automatically reaches for a telephone receiver when she hears her cellphone ring, forgetting that the land line of her childhood is now just a memory.

The kitchen is a time capsule in another way. Taped to the wall are two poignant photographs, one of Ms. Stolz as a solemn-eyed little girl in a dress with a huge white collar, the other of her mother in full supermodel regalia.

Also unchanged, remarkably, is the presence in her life of a trio of women from South America - Teresa Naranja, who is from Ecuador, and Celina Gomez and Anacia Mendoza, both from Colombia. They came regularly to clean the apartment when Ms. Stolz was a child, and, except for Ms. Naranja, who recently became ill, still do so.

In this place so layered with memory, déjà vu moments are frequent.

When Ms. Stolz roots around in closets, she sometimes comes upon relics of her past. Once she found her father's little black book, a survivor from his bachelor days, filled with name after name of available women.

One day when she was leaving her apartment, she unthinkingly took the service elevator to the basement garage, even though the family's car hadn't been parked there for years. When she is cooking, she sometimes thinks she can go to the narrow terrace and pick a handful of basil, even though it has been years since her mother grew pots of herbs there.

Ms. Stolz has been able to stay in this place thanks to the miracle of rent stabilization, under which the rent of certain apartments remain controlled as long as the tenant's income does not rise above a certain level for two years in a row. Ms. Stolz pays only $2,150 for this 1,500-square-foot space; in this building an apartment of a comparable size (though not a penthouse) would ordinarily rent for about $4,500.

Memories are as much a part of this apartment as the chairs and tables.

"I can tell you something that happened in every room in the apartment," Ms. Stolz said. She remembers, for example, where she was standing when her mother told her that her first dog, a black and white cocker spaniel named Speckles, had died.

Some of the memories of her teenage years are painful. On occasion, she and her parents got along so poorly, the three of them would sit around the dining room table, utterly silent.

But today her relationship with her parents is vastly improved, so much so that she describes them as "two of my best friends."

And by now, she has memories of the apartment that are all her own, happy ones like the first New Year's Eve party she held here. Today she sits in the same spot where those silent dinners once took place, studying for her LSATs.

"It's a bit strange," she said. "When I was at Brearley, with all those really rich girls, I was embarrassed to have play dates here because I had one of the smallest apartments. And now I have the biggest house of all my friends."