Second, though she spent her 20s in Paris and London writing for the French edition of Vogue and palling around with Yves Saint Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld, she is not, she says, a style icon. “Certainly I grew up in the world of fashion and enjoyed it, and I think I did very well for myself in that world, but now I’m more at home in a room with a glue gun or a pot of glue or a felt-tip pen,” she says. Marian’s eye for design and prowess with a glue gun (captured in her 2005 book Glue Gun Decor) extends to a pair of flea market chairs she decorated with pieces of suzani, a Central Asian textile, that she cut out and glued onto the cushions. Similarly, a medallion from a Middle Eastern tapestry emblazons the periwinkle love seat in the guest bedroom. At 71, the former bon vivant and self-professed party girl now leads a disciplined life. She rises daily at 6:30 a.m., makes strong coffee, putters around the house a bit, then starts working at 8:30 a.m. and continues without stopping until 4 or 5 p.m. “I don’t like working at night,” Marian says. “I like the light of day, the birds singing, you know, that whole thing.” She is well-positioned for light and birdsong. Her workspace, a tiny shed behind her small 18th-century house, sits in a colorful garden overlooking the Hudson River north of New York City. In addition to solo projects, she is working on plate designs for interior designer Christopher Spitzmiller and a collection of fabrics with designer Kerry Joyce. At an antique table she transformed with lacquer paint, Marian creates floral illustrations using the felt-tip pens she stores in chipboard canisters. She found the lamps on eBay and trimmed the shades. Storage baskets and hanging tassels offer easy access to materials. She sources pressed flowers and leaves from around the world via Etsy. In the evening she has people over (cooking for and entertaining groups of friends at least once a week) or works on her illustrations, covering paper or paper lampshades with felt-tip images of fantastical, graphic, sinuous, entirely fictional plants. “I’ve always liked to do things with my hands. I’ve got good hands,” she says. “I’m a do-it-yourselfer—always have been—but now I’m able to do it full blast, which is wonderful. It’s absolutely wonderful. I’ve never worked harder or with more pleasure.”
