At Home With Yann Nury, the Fashion World’s Favorite Chef

Question: Why did the tick-fearing New Yorkers cross the country lawn? Answer: To get to the Jean Prouvé cabin on the other side.

As sunset began falling on Yann Nury’s home in Pound Ridge, New York, the French chef and his wife, Grace Douglas, led guests on an adventure. Trailing the couple across the sprawling lawn, past the apple and cherry orchards, the group was greeted by a miraculous sight. While at first their attention landed on the generous caviar service arrayed on vintage silver, a magnum of Pol Roger champagne at the ready, their eyes soon turned to something that even this well-traveled crowd had never seen: a maison démontable by Atéliers Jean Prouvé—one of just 130 movable pavilions made in France in the mid-1940s. The humble yet pedigreed prefabricated cabin—which will eventually travel the country to host Nury’s unparalleled nomadic dining ­ experiences—is the perfect expression of his entertaining style: a creative combination of impeccable ease and­ exceptional ingredients.

In the 21 years since the classically trained chef moved to New York from Paris to intern at Daniel Boulud’s catering company, he has become the luxury world’s private chef and caterer of choice, traveling the globe with his team to produce hundreds of dinners a year, be it a feast at the Desert Botanical Garden in Arizona for Hermès (the brief: 15 courses, no utensils, with each component of the meal integrated into the decor); a meal for 450 guests of Cartier at the Conciergerie in Paris, with all of the sterling silverware sourced from Nury’s collection; or a dinner under the Saturn V rocket at NASA, in partnership with Omega watches.

In 2023, Nury combined his lifelong love of hyperspecific design with his métier of crafting to open La Résidence. Set in a 3,000-square-foot loft overlooking New York’s SoHo, the atelier—a kind of word-of-mouth culinary social club—hosts invitation-only meals for in-the-know guests. There, those who are as passionate about food and l’art de la table as they are about design will be rewarded by such treasures as a colorful cabinet made by Prouvé and Charlotte Perriand for Air France employees in the Republic of Congo in 1952; a suite of antique copper cookware that extends to more than 100 pieces; and rare vintage tableware and glasses that Nury and Douglas began collecting decades ago. Connoisseurs of contemporary furniture will take note of the bottle green mohair sofa designed by Nury’s collaborator on the project, the celebrated French architect Charles Zana, who envisioned the loft as “a living space for gastronomy.”

Zana and Nury were introduced in 2019, when the architect was looking for a chef to help him celebrate his appointment as Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, one of France’s highest honors. The meal was pushed back two years, “but we started to talk about the New York kitchen, and now we’ve created seven meals together and designed two projects. Plus, I cooked for his wedding in Saint-Paul-de-Vence,” said Nury with a smile, recalling the Provençal feast he served in the sculpture garden of the Fondation Maeght for Zana’s wedding to Parisian jewelry designer Daphné Lignel. Zana also helped Nury and Douglas with the renovation of their Pound Ridge home, which was built for the daughter of one of the town’s founders in the 1780s.

“The house was a dream project, 10 years in the making—a dream to continue blending our passion for entertainment, cooking, and hospitality,” said Nury. “There are five different locations to cook, with different mediums. But it’s also a creative haven.”

The design process began five years ago with Zana’s sketch on a paper tablecloth. He envisioned creating a double-height center staircase inspired by 18th-century French designs; shrinking the kids’ rooms to make space for a shared play area; and, most importantly, transforming an adjacent barn, with its original beams and chestnut ceiling boards, into the kitchen and dining room. “My sons love cooking too, so we wanted to use the biggest room,” Nury explained. “People always say the kitchen is the heart of the home,” Douglas added. “I think Yann’s heart is the kitchen. It’s where he shows his love and where he goes to relax.”

The soaring room, which easily absorbs the largest Noguchi pendant lamp, is a culinary wonderland, from the dramatic island and back wall carved from Italian limestone to the professional French stove, which requires three-star skills. Several sets of pocket doors close to conceal stations, including a coffee zone and the pantry, with its many kinds of flour. The thoroughly considered layout was also designed to showcase the couple’s culinary treasures, such as the antique copper pots that they’ve been hand-carrying, one by one, from France for the past 15 years. “There’s a purpose to this collection,” Nury said of the pieces, all of which are regularly incorporated into both professional and personal meals. “It’s things we can use.”

The rest of the home also balances history and modernity, provenance and practicality. Humble three-legged stools from the midcentury French woodworkers’ collective Les Artisans de Marolles coexist with patinated bronze Rick Owens side tables and a plywood–and–petrified antler chair that, while contemporary, “really spoke to us because of the craftsmanship,” Nury said. The room’s original stone fireplace is softened by a white bouclé Pierre Paulin Alpha sofa and chairs—the same model that was commissioned by President Georges Pompidou and his wife, Claude, for the private apartments of the Élysée Palace in 1972. Nury bought the set because it represented a tipping point in modern furniture. “The fact that Pompidou accepted to bring design into L’Élysée and embrace those creators, for me, was very important. As a collector of design, I think that is really what changed everything.”

Similar stories can be shared throughout the home. There’s the picture frame the couple ­ carried back from their favorite antique-frame dealer at the flea market in Paris, finding the painting to go in it years later, and the antique Russian silver incense thurible they found in London, which Douglas designated as a planter. “It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, let’s build a house and do a mood board and buy everything,’” Nury said of their project. “First of all, we couldn’t. And second, the pressure of being forced to do all of this at once was just…what about falling in love with things? That was a big part of the process, and why Charles was also really infatuated with this.”

Seated down the hill in the Prouvé cabin—a bucket list acquisition that took Nury years to obtain—Zana was in conversation with Alison Cayne, the creator of the soon-to-launch fragrance line Choulie, who was telling him that the sinuous upholstered bed he designed was onher dream list when she was furnishing her weekend home a few miles away. Nearby, as polished silver goblets of champagne were passed around, cooks were baking rustic buckwheat sourdough flatbreads in the embers of a grill’s fire and brushing them with citrus butter, to accompany the caviar in lieu of blini. “Take a lot and spread it on,” Nury urged art adviser Leslie Fritz, whose home could be made out through the trees. Nury slipped into French, miming slathering a ­ generous amount of jam on toast: “Il faut le tartiner!”

Guests’ children took turns on the steel beam swings before heading off to play hide-and-seek in the orchard. As the sun dipped just below the treeline, Object & Thing founder Abby Bangser and her husband, Matt Bangser, of Art Intelligence Global—followed by beauty entrepreneur Tata Harper; artists Nicole Wittenberg, Megan Marrin, and Federico de Francesco; director of Frieze Americas Christine Messineo and her husband, film producer Matthew Shattuck; Mario Apollon Mowatt of Van Cleef & Arpels; and others—made their way back toward the kitchen, where a sumptuous summer feast awaited.

Just outside the kitchen’s glass doors, Nury was inaugurating his sizable custom grill, housed in a wide, waxed concrete–finished chimney. Trays of Montauk clams simmered in vin jaune broth with celery from the garden; bottles of chilled Bandol Domaine Tempier rosé awaited nearby. Once the flames had subsided, the chef slowly roasted beef tenderloin and the season’s first tomatoes until both were impossibly tender, a nod to Nury’s childhood in the South of France. (His American touch? They were served with ramp jus.)

At the kitchen island, guests and neighbors, such as ceramicist Re Jin Lee, helped themselves to the rosy beef, as well as to cauliflower gratin with verveine from the garden and roasted potatoes with thyme blossoms. Nearby, Douglas had transformed the family’s candlelit dinner table into a tableau fit for the film The Taste of Things: ripe cantaloupe draped with jamón Ibérico cut paper-thin on a vintage Berkel slicer, trays of plump figs with buckwheat honey, and silver cake stands of varying heights bearing painterly tomato tarts. Accompanying the homemade breads—including a brioche spiked with Timut peppercorns and thyme blossoms, baked in vintage copper soufflé molds—was the talk of the table: a basket bearing five pounds of beurre d’Isigny from France. “Yann first sent it to me as a joke when he was out of town,” said Douglas. “Who needs flowers when you have butter?”

As for the evening’s menu, “it started by how to utilize the spaces,” explained Nury, his arm sweeping from the kitchen to the grill area to the cabin down the hill. “And then things that I was very excited to share with the people coming tonight. I wanted to keep the evening simple and really make everything shine. My favorite way to cook is focusing on the ingredients: I finalize the menu at the farmers market.”

Douglas summed up her husband’s genius: “When I met Yann, his excitement for life and people was infectious. It still is, and I think it’s what makes him so good at entertaining and hosting. It’s also what we have in common: We love to share everything we love in life with others.”

While the caviar and champagne, and the tenderloin and its accompanying red Burgundy, were indulgently celebratory, the evening’s most generous flex was the enormous vintage silver berry bowl from Tiffany overflowing with Harry’s Berries, the sought-after California strawberries that are so perfect, Hermès served them to guests at its recent presentation in Los Angeles. “They are Grace’s secret weapon for dinner parties,” said Nury. Toward the end of the meal, guests scooped a spoonful onto their plates, alongside a cloud of whipped crème fraîche, returning shortly thereafter for more. Once the couple’s sons, Alexander, 14, and Grayson, 9, told the kids about them, the bounty quickly disappeared. As the candles flickered low, signaling the end of a memorable evening, only a single berry remained.

Hair and makeup for Grace Douglas by Ginger Leigh Ryan for Bumble and Bumble.