ALISON AND ADAM NELSON'S Chelsea apartment is largely chocolate-colored: dark chocolate-stained walnut and oak furniture; a mocha-y ultrasuede couch; living room walls the color of one of Ms. Nelson's best-selling chocolate bars, Café Con Leche, which she offers in her stylish West Village store, Chocolate Bar; and a bedroom whose walls remind her of a red-wine-infused truffle called Chocolate Lush she will be selling rafts of this weekend for Valentine's Day. These walls, painted a dark, deep, blood red, Ms. Nelson said, "are the color of the ganache at the moment you add the red wine.
"In the hall is a David LaChapelle portrait of the model Naomi Campbell digitally miniaturized and set astride a very, very large chocolate bunny. (Mr. Nelson, who is also an actor, owns a public relations company called WORKHOUSE (www.workhousepr.com); Mr. LaChapelle is a former client.) Lulu, the Nelsons' 1½-year-old daughter, sometimes refers to Ms. Campbell as "Momma." "What does it mean to live a chocolate lifestyle?" Ms. Nelson asked rhetorically the other day, in explanation of a life philosophy and business plan, and then answered: "It means having lots of fun, not taking yourself too seriously and using the best ingredients. Oh, and eating more chocolate." Lulu laughed uproariously, and Spot, a 7-year-old Lab mix (black, not chocolate) eviscerated a stuffed duck (his, not Lulu's) onto the living-room floor. Mr. Nelson deftly removed its remains with a pink Hello Kitty vacuum cleaner. Mr. Nelson, 35, and Ms. Nelson, 31, have been living in this one-bedroom in the London Terrace apartments since July 2001, when a friend's dot-com tanked and the friend couldn't pay the rent. When they signed their sublease, the wait for primary leases was about five years. (The complex, on 23rd and 24th Streets between 9th and 10th Avenues, is so big - when built, it had 1,665 apartments - it feels like its own neighborhood.) When the sublease ran out, after 9/11, Mr. Nelson said, the waiting list had vanished. Chocolate Bar's brown and orange palette - retro-reconfigured, as Mr. Nelson likes to say - is distinctly of its moment. The Nelsons' apartment, with its vintage television set, collection of double-lens reflex cameras and 40's-style telephone, is more like a sepia print of a much earlier moment sometime in the last century. "I have this thing that when someone takes a picture of me," Ms. Nelson said, "I don't want anyone to know what year it is. I have this notion of being timeless." They've been married since November 2001. A few weeks after the wedding, Ms. Nelson bonded with Mr. Nelson's college roommate's boyfriend over dinner - and a chocolate layer cake baked by the boyfriend that was devoured by Ms. Nelson. Intuitively gauging the appetites of a city starving for sin and sugar, the two sketched the outlines of Chocolate Bar, which they saw as a neighborhood hangout and candy store for grown-ups. (South Beach dieters, Ms. Nelson said with some amusement, now eat her dark chocolate bar with peanut butter spread upon it.) The store opened the following May. Monica Lewinsky was their first customer, an occurrence Ms. Nelson took to be a very good omen. Ms. Nelson is a chocolate lobbyist of the most modern sort, and Mr. Nelson is her most ardent supporter. Thinner than she has any right to be, given a daily chocolate consumption that includes two cups of Chocolate Bar's smoky-tasting hot chocolate, a spiced brownie and at least two truffles, the lovely, lanky and tattooed Ms. Nelson, have aimed to make chocolate seem urgently cool, the opposite of frou-frou. Indeed, with its ironic, 70's-era styling and deadpan candy names, Chocolate Bar is an anti-bonbon. "When the store first opened," Mr. Nelson said, "people would come in and complain about the price of its $1.35 truffles. Now, they're asking about the cacao content." Ms. Nelson talked about chocolate varietals, and about savory applications like shaving a dark bar onto French bread with olive oil and sea salt. Nelson's book, "Chocolate Bar: Recipes and Entertaining Ideas for Living the Sweet Life" (Running Press; $24.95), makes a case for a chocolate lifestyle, with recipes for spiced cocoa meatballs, a chocolate malted and a chocolate body scrub. For photographs, it uses not the usual chocolate vernacular -pastry bags or chunks of crumbled bittersweet chocolate - but portraits by Brian Kennedy of urban hipsters brandishing chocolate martinis or huge bars of chocolate, models heavily accessorized with tattoos, gym-pumped arms and ironic upraised eyebrows. At home a few weeks ago, Ms. and Mr. Nelson seemed the calmest of entrepreneurs, despite a marriage running on two companies. They met in the summer of 1998, when Mr. Nelson was doing a one-man show about Lenny Bruce called "How to Talk Dirty & Influence People: The Sick Humor of Lenny Bruce." Ms. Nelson stage-managed the production and brought Mr. Nelson lunch each day from her other job, waitressing at Once Upon a Tart on Sullivan Street in SoHo. "She walked in the first day, nearly bald, wearing a tiny rock 'n' roll T-shirt and tattoos and this smile," Mr. Nelson said. "I had to hire her." Ms. Nelson said she took one look at Mr. Nelson and thought, "Uh oh." She had dreamed of opening a bakery; he had pretty much run through his dream of acting. "That was for my disposable 20's," he said. "I just wanted to make a living." He'd been house-, plant- and pet- sitting for five years, he said, sleeping in theaters or on the couches of friends. His longest run was six months in an apartment on Waverly Place, the home of a celebrity with a sudden hit television show and lots of plants. Mr. Nelson's public relations company's name is taken from a now defunct local theater company, which both Mr. Nelson and that unnamed celebrity belonged to. "It's kind of an homage," Mr. and Ms. Nelson said at exactly the same time, and in exactly the same spooky, Anne Baxter, "All About Eve" voice. "Er, sorry," they both said at once. "That happens all the time," Ms. Nelson said. At first, Mr. and Ms. Nelson worked together at Workhouse. Clients called Ms. Nelson "the Clotter," Mr. Nelson said, "for her ability to stop the bleeding." Ms. Nelson said, "I just fed them." They found an empty storefront on Eighth Avenue between Jane and Horatio Streets and renovated it themselves in four months. It had been a mom-and-pop mailbox store, she said, and one night the mom and pop vanished. "The mail kept coming for a while," she said. "As we were making the store, the landlord would be outside surrounded by a crowd of people, his arms full of mail, yelling out names." Ms. Nelson is waving the chocolate banner alone, with a little help this weekend. From 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. Sunday and Monday (the store opens at 10 a.m.), Ms. Nelson will be in Chocolate Bar, flanked by six or seven recruits, ringing up her Booty Boxes (tag line: Give some, Get some) and Love Boxes. Last year during the same period, the store made as much money in two days as it did during the entire month of September. On Monday, Valentine's Day, Ms. Nelson will send Mr. Nelson flowers, and a box of her truffles. "He won't be seeing me," she said, "till late Monday night." Adam and Alison Nelson's apartment in London Terrace in Chelsea features much chocolate-colored furniture - Ms. Nelson owns New York's award-winning Chocolate Bar, a stylish West Village store. In this multimedia presentation she talks about her apartment in New York City. View the slideshow here: http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/realestate/20050213_HABITATS_AUDIOSS/blocker.html
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PAGE SIX MAGAZINE: SIX LIFE: THE ULTIMATE IN REAL ESTATE VOYEURISM
ALISON NELSON: FOUNDER/ CHOCOLATE BAR [WWW.CHOCOLATEBARNYC.COM] & HUSBAND ADAM NELSON, CEO WORKHOUSE [WWW.WORKHOUSEPR.COM] One husband, two kids and a dog called Spot. To keep harmony in their one-bedroom apartment, chocolate diva Alison Nelson has to be an ergonomics expert. When we moved in, before the kids came along, we thought we had a big house,” laughs Alison Nelson, 34, as she walks ìnto the open plan living room, prewar apartment she shares with her husband, Adam Nelson, CEO of WORKHOUSE (www.workhousepr.com), and their children, Lulu 4 1/2, and Sailor, 18 months. These days the three-seater couch has been replaced by a dark leather two-seater from ABC Carpet and Home, and a sleek blond wood desk from West Elm stands in for a dining room table. "We wanted to make as much space as possible for the kids to run around" Says Alison, founding owner of Chocolate Bar (www.chocolatebarnyc.com). The Nelson's have rented a one-bedroom in London Terrace for the past six years--- a long time by New York standards, especially for a family of four. We know we'll have to move when Sailor needs his own room. The building doesn't have two-bedroom apartments," she says. (Sailor currently occupies a white white Offi crib filled with Ugly dolls in a corner of his parents’ bedroom; Lulu sleeps in a converted walk-in closet.) “Each year we look at what’s out there, but we can’t find another building with as much charm, not to mention a beautiful, Olympic-size covered courtyard and roof deck.” Often referred to as “the downtown Dakota,” London Terrace Gardens takes up an entire city block, between 9th and 10th Avenues and 23rd and 24th Streets. it’s resplendent with Art Deco flxtures and has played home to Nicole Kidman,Terì Hatcher and Annie Leibovitz. “Nicole would swim in the pool every morning when she here,” says Adam. Alison and Adam were married in January 2002. Five months later Alison opened her first Chocolate Bar, a coffee Shop offering retro-style chocolate for grown-ups, in the West Village. There was the sophisticated uptown Chocolate Bar cafe’ inside Henri Bendel, and a third store in New Jersey which gives Alison an excuse to go to the beach. Chocolate Bar has become a hit in the Middle East, too: She has opened seven stores in Dubai and Qatar in partnership with a Dubai-based company. “I'm currently working on recipes with dates and figs to appeal to a Middle Eastern palate,” she says. “And it’s a very real possibility that we'll have to be in Qatar for the summer." At home, meanwhile, the Nelson's don't live like renters. They’ve covered one wall in the living room with Cole & Son wallpaper, and in December 2005 they renovated. “The large walk-in closet made a perfect bedroom for Lulu once we built the wall out,” says Alison. In Lulu's room, tulle and sequins spill out of a dress-up box and the doors of an old armoire have been removed so that Lulu can get to her outfits more easily (“She loves to play dress up,” says Alison. “Shes a bit of performer.") Purple and green Blik vinyls adorn the pink walls. “Vinyls are so great, especially with kids, because you can take them off if you hate them,” Alison says. Fluffy toys are lined up on the bed and an impressive Barbie coliection is stored in an over the-door shoe rack. “We were are having a Barbie explosion,” she explains. And above the made-to-meausre twin bed is a photograph of Lulu the performer in action. “Our photographer friend Brian Kennedy did a crying baby series,” she heard heard us talking about it and immediateIy made her best crying face for him.” Alison and Adam's aesthetic is a mix of modern and nostalgic. In their bedroom, a French Deco chandelier hangs over the white linen-covered antique iron bed that Adam found in a flea market long before he met Alison. “We agreed it was a keeper,” She says. “You just don't find heavy pieces like that these days.” lt’s hard to imagine the kids jumping on the pristine bed, but they do. “I need things to be too prim and proper,” says Alison. “Thats how I live my life.” Spot, a black lab mix, is also welcome on the furniture. As Alison takes a seat on the leather couch, he walks across the old wood floors and climbs up next to her. Alison crosses one slim leg over another (shes blessed with an enviable metabolism for someone who claims to gorge on chocolate|ate every night). “I found Spot in the East Village two days before I met my husband,” she says, affectionately scratching the dog behind his ears. Their living room-presided over by a David LaChapelle photograph of Milla Jovovich standing in front oŕ Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood holding a giant Oscar--- is the family's favorite room in the house. After dinner, there is usually some sort of concert. “Adam will put on a record and Lulu will get her microphone out. Sailor strums on his guitar,” says Alison` “I have two New York City kids who don't go to bed until 10 pm., no matter how hard I try.” Written by: Nadine Rubin PHOTOGRAPHY: KARIN KOHLBERG FOR PAGESÍXMAGAZINE; PROP STYLING: JAMES MASSENBURG FOR OLIVER PIRO HAIR AND MAKEUP: NAOMI VVARDEN PHOTO: Alison and her daughter, Lulu, share a moment with Mr. Warhol; Chocolate Bar chocolates; and in the bedroom, a polka-dot chair adds personality. LOU REED | MICK ROCK |
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