Maidman of Silk Purse Interiors showcases window displays

When she's not busy designing luxury model apartments in trendy Manhattan condominiums, Gail Maidman puts her talents to work creating designs, with unique themes for store windows in the Big Apple. Recently Maidman, the owner of Silk Purse Interiors, LLC, went all out dressing the window of Paron Fabrics at 206 West 40th St. in honor of the upcoming "Year of the Rabbit" to commemorate the Chinese New Year. Maidman created a virtual Chinatown celebration inside the cavernous window of the midtown family-owned fabric store. For the Paron Fabric store window, Maidman used jeweled and mirror encrusted antique hand-carved dragons running across the nine-foot window, which she featured, alongside an antique bronze rabbit - all encircled with flowing, silky Paron fabric hangings in the traditional Chinese New Year's colors of turquoise, yellow and red accenting the festive scene. "I want to make passers-by stop and really look," says Maidman, whose husband Richard Maidman is chairman of Townhouse Management, a residential management company that built the luxury Eastside condominium, the Aurora, on 37th and Third Avenue and the mega mansion between Madison and Fifth Avenues on East 63rd that is now renting extraordinary, luxury apartments. Her son, developer, Evan Haymes, along with Matthew Bronfman, built the Onyx Chelsea, a luxury condominium that sold out quickly in 2009. In that building, Maidman designed a spectacular, New York City-themed apartment featuring an oversized Chrysler Building bed. The photographer Evan Joseph made the apartment the subject of his book, The Onyx: Before and After. The unique apartment was also featured in New York Magazine's Video Blog, "Walk-through: The Onyx" http://videos.nymag.com/video/Walk-through-The-Onyx. "I like drama and pizzazz, and interesting and different" said Maidman. "I don't like ordinary." At Paron Fabrics, the store's vice president Mark Glenn praised Maidman's window creations. "She is a lovely lady who does beautiful work," said Glenn, who added that Maidman designed six other windows for the store in the last two years. "People come in and want to buy some of the unusual pieces she uses for her displays. In this city, for something to get that much attention is rare." Maidman says she learned theme designs from her late mother, Jeanette Lowe, also a New York designer. Earlier this winter, she filled a bookstore window in Port Washington, Long Island, with a snowy Nutcracker Suite moment, with ballerinas in tutus and a mural with cutouts of ice skating girls who twirled on a piece of mirrored "ice." For that project, Maidman sought out some help from local school students who drew and painted the ice skaters. But for most windows, Maidman's own eccentric tastes and style are on display. A few years ago in honor of the US Tennis Open, she covered the floor of an Upper East Side jewelry store window with tennis balls cut in half. In the middle of the window display was a net and two tennis racquets suspended with invisible twine and draped with sparkling jewels and gold. Maidman, whose party-table company, "Tables that Talk," creates themed tables for private and charity events, lives in Manhattan, and spends weekends with her husband at the couple's Sands Point, Long Island Estate, renovated in 1972 by renowned architect Richard Meier, on weekends. For her next project at the Dolphin bookstore in Long Island, Maidman plans to create a beach scene, with boats bobbing on a tranquil sea. Even though, she, herself adores snow, and all things winter, she thinks people are ready to imagine themselves lying on a beautiful beach - perhaps reading a wonderful Dolphin Bookstore book.