1/15/2024 0 Comments Gerard butler images![]() ![]() “Whenever I open that huge door, I just think how lucky I am,” he says. But he repairs to New York whenever he can-and has plans to redo the loft's second floor and adjoining roof terrace. The actor, who's on the road much of the time-most recently promoting his romantic comedy The Bounty Hunter and the DreamWorks film How to Train Your Dragon-also maintains a small flat in London and a Spanish-style house in the Hollywood Hills. “I was going to put in those deep red theater curtains and have them wrap all the way around,” Butler reveals, “but I decided not to go quite that far.” The theater, where Butler screens “dramas, thrillers or one of the more interesting action movies,” is the centerpiece of the apartment, its state-of-the-art screen framed by a proscenium fashioned out of a pair of Indian columns, a wooden arch support from a cathedral in the Bronx and a stone lion's head from an old library. The main part of the loft is organized into a dining area featuring an immense medieval-style wood-and-iron table a cozy living area centered around the brick-framed windows a kitchen with an excavated-looking backsplash composed of leftover floor tiles and a templelike home theater. With Butler's penchant for old crumbling walls as a jumping-off point, the two developed the apartment's fanciful aesthetic over time. “I guess I would describe the apartment as bohemian old-world rustic chateau with a taste of baroque.” “I wanted something elegant and gorgeous and at the same time rather masculine and raw,” the actor declares, his Glasgow burr somehow enhancing the description. Why, King Leonidas of Sparta, who else? The place starts to make a little more sense when one considers that its owner is the actor Gerard Butler, and Gerard Butler is known for channeling such larger-than-life figures as the Spartan king, Attila the Hun, Dracula, the Phantom of the Opera and Beowulf. The doors alone are remarkable enough to stop the most jaded Manhattanite in his tracks: Who in the world lives here? Medieval castle? Ancestral manor house? Try a two-story loft in the heart of New York's ultratrendy Chelsea district. Plaster walls chipped and mottled with age, massive columns supporting limestone lions, crystal chandeliers casting spidery shadows. A ceiling fresco depicting the rape of Ganymede. Thirteen-foot-tall doors with a knocker mahogany that could summon the dead. This article originally appeared in the May 2010 issue of Architectural Digest. ![]()
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