With her leopard-patterned pants, chunky brown necklaces and gumball-size gold cocktail rings, Renée Demsey, 92, is as maximalist and vivacious as her one-bedroom Manhattan apartment.
Ms. Demsey, a decorative painter, was an artist-in-residence at Bergdorf Goodman in the 1970s and ’80s. Last year, she participated in a group exhibition at the department store, and her bright renderings of flowers and people sell on sites like 1stDibs. “Call it my artsy side, but I like dramatic,” she said. “Everything has to be dramatic.”
According to Linda Fargo, the senior vice president of the fashion office and director of women’s fashion and store presentation at Bergdorf Goodman, “To have Renée back to be part of a group show is like coming full circle. Renée’s paintings are like taking a happy pill.”
She has lived in the senior living community Sunrise at East 56th Street since late 2023, in an approximately 700-square-foot ode to eclecticism consisting of a bedroom, bathroom, dressing area and living room. A leopard-print carpet covers it all. The terrace that runs along the entire length is a biophilic wonderland of azaleas, boxwoods, hollies and euonymus shrubs. The home, a rental, like all Sunrise apartments, marks the first time in Ms. Demsey’s nine-decade-plus existence that she has inhabited a place that she can claim as entirely her own. “I went from living with my parents to getting married when I was 20 and living with my husband for almost 70 years,” she said.
Born in Chicago, Ms. Demsey grew up in Cleveland as an only child and became a working artist in her early 20s. Her husband, Joseph Demsey, was in the steel manufacturing business, and the couple lived in the same home for 60 years in the Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights.
They had two children, Mary Jo Friedman, a Pilates instructor based in western Massachusetts, and John Demsey, a beauty industry consultant and former Estée Lauder executive, who lives in an Upper East Side townhouse that rivals his mother’s apartment in flair.
After a decade of deteriorating health, Ms. Demsey’s husband died in June 2022. They had a loving relationship and slept side-by-side for most of their marriage, except for the last three years. “I couldn’t stand the heat, and he couldn’t stand the air-conditioning, so he moved to a spare bedroom,” she recalled.
In the last weeks of his life, Ms. Demsey was experiencing her own medical crisis: A hiatal hernia had traveled to her lungs, leaving her unable to breathe without a respirator. Doctors gave her three months to live.
“I recovered, but didn’t know what I was going to do. I just knew I couldn’t live in the house. My husband was gone. My kids had moved out,” she said.
The Sunrise unit wouldn’t be her first footprint in Manhattan: Ms. Demsey and her husband had owned various apartments in the city for more than 40 years. “I was here often for work and would stay at our place almost every month,” she said.
She and her son collaborated on the design of the residence, which was created from two studios.
“My mom’s master bedroom in Cleveland was all leopard, so that’s where we began,” Mr. Demsey said. “The idea was to have an urban jungle with elements of our family home.”
A 1950s regal ceramic snow leopard that belonged to Ms. Demsey’s mother, Beatrice Mishell, commands the entryway to the terrace, while the living room’s centerpiece is a couch with flower and leopard motifs from the artist’s wedding trousseau. Accessorizing the couch are floral needlepoint pillows that Ms. Demsey designed and her mother stitched.
Most of the rest of the furnishings are new or recently acquired, including the custom built-in wood cabinetry, chinoiserie wallpaper from Schumacher, a chocolate leather chair from Scully & Scully and 1970s Karl Springer shagreen coffee table from 1stDibs. And of course the leopard-print carpet from Stark.
After the décor was arranged, mother and son distributed 400 family photos around the unit and hung several of Ms. Demsey’s artworks, now with contemporary black frames. Her late husband’s favorite painting — a house in Normandy against a seascape — is displayed in the bedroom.
“I’ve met people here who are in the same circumstances as me,” she said. “Their husbands have recently passed away. They’ve left their familiar homes, their old friends and moved to a strange place, to a new environment.”
Her solitary — though by no means unsocial — life has brought new habits, such as bingeing on television shows like the Apple TV series “Presumed Innocent.” “Joseph and I never watched TV,” she recalled. “That’s changed since I’ve been living alone.”
Her art practice has changed, too. “I used to use only acrylic paints, but I recently started using colored pencils and do a lot of sketching,” she said.
“I don’t mind being alone,” she added. “I quite like it. Even if I am by myself, I don’t feel isolated. I feel at home.”
