“I have a vision about spaces and what can be done with them,” Janet Langsam declares. Langsam, who shares her home with her partner, Joe Schneider, has spent the past 20 years knocking down walls, adding and expanding rooms, and even moving a staircase in her contemporary Armonk home. “You can change anything,” she says. “You just have to have imagination.” The walls are decorated with modern and contemporary prints and paintings, including artwork created by one of her daughters and a few pieces she’s created herself. Yes, she’s also an artist!
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So Sweet
This hand-painted glass dish was always full of candy when it sat on her parents’ living-room table, in the Far Rockaway section of Queens. Langsam’s mother bought it at a moving sale.
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Diamonds Are Forever
Langsam spotted two matching Harry Bertoia Diamond chairs while shopping with her daughter at an antiques shop in Tarrytown eight years ago. “My daughter said I had to get them,” Langsam says. “So I did!”
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Calling All Gladioli
This colorful ceramic gladiolus vase was made by Red Wing Pottery in the 1950s. Found at an antiques store in Tupper Lake, New York, the piece is part of a large pottery collection that Langsam has amassed over the years. “When I see these little, beautiful things, I buy them,” she says.
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Lampapalooza
This 1940s lamp sports a plaster base and a double-tiered fiberglass shade with whipstitching. Langsam discovered the fixture at an antiques shop while driving up to Poughkeepsie. Although she didn’t buy it at first, she decided to purchase the lamp when she spotted it in the store a year later. “It’s like a piece of sculpture,” she says, “only it gives light.”
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Weighty Matters
Langsam received this colorful glass paperweight as a birthday present in 1978 from Henry Geldzahler, an art curator, critic, and historian who served as New York City’s Commissioner of Cultural Affairs (she was his First Deputy Commissioner at the time).
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Hey, Hey, Heywood!
This mid-century modern Heywood-Wakefield birch side table in Langsam’s living room is one of a pair that she bought at an antiques show in Bedford back in 2000. “I really like the shape,” she says. “The modern lines are simple but so interesting.”
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Chair-ity Case
One of Langsam’s first purchases when she moved to Westchester in the early 1990s was a set of Lucite chairs. She saw them at a house sale in Rye and bought all six for $250. “I couldn’t figure out why no one else was interested. They’re terrific!”
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