The Selby Was in My Place... Twice
Wherein I Give Some Background on My Long History with Todd Selby & Share A Bit About my Primary Bedroom
I’ve known Todd Selby since the late ‘90s. He used to freelance for me as a street style photographer when I was the fashion editor at the New York Post.
Todd’s job was a fun one: identifying stylish women at parties, clubs and one in public and photographing them for a weekly trend page I edited called “Street Smart Style.” Danielle Levitt, my good friend and SSS collaborator (there’s a post about her and our work coming in the future), was Todd’s girlfriend at the time and she got him the gig.
Flash forward to the early aught-teens (is that a thing?), when Todd, by then known as The Selby, had positioned himself as one of the world’s foremost environmental style photographers, taking casual but politely revealing photos of culturally relevant folks in their private spaces.
The Selby, as a business, started relatively small. Todd’s posts were delivered in blog form and featured the homes of cool cats with a certain amount of indie cred across the country, though predominately in NYC and LA. While not everyone he shot was a public figure, most had a certain amount of indie cred. He launched the project in the US, but it quickly became international, including people in creative industries like fashion, art, design, food, and media.
While Todd’s MO is to shoot stylish people, not necessarily famous ones, occasionally the twain do meet, as in the case of Pharrell Williams and Michael Stipe (had to dig deep on his site for those). I particularly love it when he photographs famous maximalists of the fashion variety, like Dries Van Noten, J.J. Martin, Zandra Rhodes, Carla Sozzani, and the late Karl Lagerfeld. For me, getting to peek inside their homes and offices is like going on a mental vacation.
But mainly, Todd shoots regular people with interesting personal style. Sometimes he even shoots them twice.
Make that one time: I am proud to be the first subject on which he double-dipped.
Todd photographed my house for the first time in 2013. This was the Callaway Compound 1.0, pre-renovation. It was a great space, but honestly the main thing my home had going for it was that it was a showroom for my expansive closet and many, many collections. I still love the images from that shoot (on his site, they’re at the bottom of the page, below the new ones), but they’re from such a different time — a different era of me. I mean, so much has changed in my life since then, least of all my home design.
The second shoot was done almost a decade later, in 2022, when Todd came to town to photograph some of our cities grooviest families. Some of them are featured in his third book, The Selby Comes Home. You can preorder it here. (Note: Nashvillians might recognize the cover stars, the Ezell-Turner family, photographed in the kitchen of their downtown apartment.)
In celebration of this photographic reunion, I am going to post a series of stories about the things in and the inspiration behind the rooms in Todd’s photos. His post was just the nudge I needed to start writing about my home more in this forum.
This edition, I’m covering my primary bedroom. Stay turned for the rest of the house, as seen through Todd’s eyes, in future posts.
Things to know before we get started: My home is a 1948 not-quite-bungalow in East Nashville that I bought post-recession for an obnoxiously low price. It was a bit of a Frankenstein home when I got it, having been added on to at least four times by what must have been weekend warriors. (My line has always been that the former renovations had been done by someone with my skillset, and I don’t have a skillset.)
I knew from the start that I was going to remodel it eventually, which I did six years ago, largely on the equity that came with the ongoing gentrification of East Nashville. The 18-month makeover started in late September 2018; it finally got to move-in stage — and I am not kidding — a week before lockdown started in 2020, and mere days after a tornado destroyed a large swath of my neighborhood. My contractor tore down all of the shitty parts (walls were literally kicked down) and added 1,300 square-feet of new living space, including a primary bedroom, bath, dressing room, living room, and 22- x 3-foot closet that hides a multitude of crap. I gut renovated my kitchen and guest room, as well.
The Callaway Compound 2.0 has 2,300 square-feet of inside space, plus another 400 or so on the patio outside. It’s a luxurious amount of space for one person but I make it work. It’s blast to live in here and I stay at home as much as I can.
They look kind of bright here, but the walls of my bedroom are a so-blue-it’s-almost-black shade called Inkwell by Sherwin Williams. The same color is on the ceiling, which vaults to 15 feet (the entire space is 17x23). You can’t see it in these shots, but there’s a dramatic metal egg-shaped light fixture with “ivy” threaded through the cage design, a gift from Santa one year (he scored it at the Habitat for Humanity thrift store in Cleveland, TN — my hometown). You can’t see them in these photos either, but under the eaves on either end of the room, there are rose windows — at least that’s what I’m calling them: technically they’re just plain circles. Also unseen: my bed faces a bank of floor-to-ceiling windows divided by a pair of French doors that lead out to my patio. The whole thing is very Tony Duquette, and that’s absolutely intentional: he’s one of my main design inspirations.
The photo of me at the very top of this post was taken by Todd in my bedroom (man, I really need to paint that thermostat). There is a wonderful sitting area between my bed and the patio doors, featuring a black mid-century rattan couch set that is on somewhat of a permanent loan from my Aunt Jane. (I’ve had it for almost 30 years at this point, so does that make it mine under common law?)
The matching chairs on either side of the MCM dresser (from GasLamp Antique Mall) are from a set of eight discovered on Etsy by my pal Savannah Yarborough; she had two left over from a project, so I snagged them (still not sure if I’ve paid you, Sav) and had them covered in leopard print velvet by Braemore, whose sexy take on big cats I love. I mounted a red YSL monogram scarf, a Christmas gift from the company from my NY days, on stretchers to display as a work of art (I’ve been doing the “pop of red” thing long before it became a meme).
The lamps are a long-ago thrift find from Chattanooga. And, on the couch, the crazy quilt stuffed swan pillow (intentionally clashing with the antique crazy-quilt blanket covering the cushions) was made by my mom’s good friend, Benè Deacon. Fun fact: Miss Benè, as my sisters and I called her when we were little, had a very successful reproduction majolica company in my hometown called Majolica Wares. She sold to Neiman Marcus and Gump’s and all of those fancy guys. I buy her pieces whenever I see them (you’ll know them by the MW imprinted on the base) to add to my growing collection.
The brass canopy bed in the shot above is a showstopper. I found it at GasLamp pre-renovation and stored it, disassembled, until I could reconstruct it in my finished space. The frame ended up being too wide for the king-sized mattress I’d ordered, so I paid a guy named Bubba in Madison $125 to cut it down for me. (I share the price only to contrast it with the other quote I got, which was from an East Nashville metal design firm that was going to charge me over $1,600 and couldn’t get to it for six weeks, maybe longer. Bubba did it overnight. The moral of this story: don’t discount the good-old boys.)
A majority the furniture in the photo, and in my home, comes from thrift or second-hand stores and antique malls. The black chair is part of a pair by Pier One that I found years ago at a Nashville Goodwill. They have a great story attached to them. The first time Todd shot my house, the chairs were in my Florida room (RIP - but you can see a few shots of it at the bottom of his new post). A few months after the 2013 piece ran, I got an email from the design department for the 2014 Annie movie reboot. They came very close to renting them from me to use in Miss Hannigan’s office, but logistics got in the way.
The brass Mastercraft Greek key Parson’s table at the end of the bed is an incredible thrift score: I got it for $10 at the Berry Hill Goodwill. (An identical version is currently listed on 1st Dibs for $9,500 which is insane, but it’s definitely worth more than a ten-spot.) The little bentwood chair in front of it was mine when I was little. For decades, it lived at the cabin my grandfather built in the 1940s in the Cherokee National Forest in East Tennessee. The funky monkey sitting in it was a Nashville flea market find. He’s homemade and dressed in a tromp l’oil yellow and green polyester suit and matching hat with real mink trim. I replaced his plain button eyes with huge rhinestones, which give him the permanently delighted look of a cartoon character that just dropped acid.
This last shot is a bit of a tease. You can see the Chinese arch I incorporated into my design in this photo and the one at the top of the post. However, it’s technically part of my hallway, and it has a story significant enough to stand on its own. Which it will, in a post coming very soon.
Thanks so much for reading! Send me comments, questions, cries of outrage. Love to hear from you.
Libby
I love the Southern vixen sorceress vibe. Just absolutely love. So chic.