Nicholas Lowry, the 53-year-old president of Swann Auction Galleries and a longtime appraiser of PBS’ “Antiques Roadshow,” describes his Manhattan apartment as a “wunderkammer,” or a cabinet of curiosities.
He’s stuffed the one-bedroom rental with items that keep him happy — such as some 50 busts of figures from Beethoven to Elvis and roughly 60 plants (including three trees) that front a 15-foot window — and he hopes they also charm anyone who visits.
“A lot of people [say], ‘Oh my God, this is going to take me hours to go through, there’s so much to see,’ ” the Manhattan native told The Post. “And I’m happy to let people do that when they come over.”
Lowry has lived in this stately apartment near Union Square — whose great room features wood paneling and gargoyles under a 27-foot beamed cathedral ceiling — for seven years, and he intends to keep filling the space with curios.
“It really is the outer manifestation of my inner mind,” he said. “I’m a little ADD, I’m a little bit of a hoarder and I like things around me. The way I dress is very colorful and eclectic, and I guess that’s the way I live … it makes me comfortable.”
Lowry recently opened his door to Homeworthy, a real estate- and interior design-focused media company that profiles big personalities and the grand homes they live in, which got a first-hand peek of his collection of, well, everything.
In the October-shot video, Lowry also shows off a gumball machine filled with matchbooks, a vintage newspaper/magazine rack now used as a bar, even a reproduction of a suit of armor whose helmet is topped with a crown of pink flowers.
What’s more, Lowry also keeps a stock of vintage posters — particularly a collection of hangings from his father’s native Czechoslovakia — many of which he can’t hang. They number in the hundreds, but it isn’t wall space that prevents him from displaying them.
The great room’s walls come adorned with a well-preserved golden brocade fabric, which he neither wants to cover nor destroy — so he hung some of them in a hallway leading to his bedroom. One is a 1930s advertisement for Czech motorcycle manufacturer JAWA, which shows a man cruising on a lipstick-red ride.
But it’s another poster that has his heart.
Perched on the mantel over his great room fireplace, there’s a framed illustration of Consul, the performing chimpanzee who was regarded as the smartest monkey in the world, who’s dressed in a patterned suit and riding a bicycle.
“It speaks to me on so many levels,” Lowry told The Post of this piece. “It speaks to my poster collecting, it speaks to my interest and knowledge of history, and it speaks to fashion — because basically that monkey is dressed the way I dress.”
In his kitchen, another prized poster. A riff on a 1960s ad campaign for Levy’s Jewish Rye Bread, which famously showed people of various ethnicities eating sandwiches under text saying, “You don’t need to be Jewish to love Levy’s,” Lowry’s frame shows a chimp eating a piece of bread. “You don’t have to be human to love Levy’s,” it reads.
“Having been in the [antiques] business as long as I’ve been, which is some 30 odd years almost, there are some things I’ve never seen before – and that really cracks me up,” he said.
Alison Kenworthy, 38, an Emmy-winning television producer who previously worked for “Good Morning America” — and who’s the founder and executive producer of Homeworthy — saw Lowry as a perfect fit for the old world-style apartment he calls home.
“The guy wears three-piece suits and a handlebar mustache — and described his home as a ‘bohemian hangout or post-apocalyptic garage sale … smorgasbord of everything,’ ” she said. “He is just an eccentric and interesting charismatic individual, and his apartment is a perfect reflection of that.”
“I’m someone who suffers from ‘clutter-itis,’ ” Lowry said in the video – but does that mean he’s done collecting? No, he said – he’ll keep filling the space as much as he can. Even now, he’s on the hunt for a reproduction Egyptian-style sarcophagus to use as décor.
“I hear from countless people, ‘You don’t have room for anything else!’ ” he said. “There’s always room for something else.”
https://nypost.com/2021/12/22/inside-antiques-roadshow-host-nicholas-lowrys-nyc-home/
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