A symphony of art
Mur Sherman Hayman moved to her Center City condo with her husband, Mark Paul, five years ago, and they made it their own with art and architecture.
Near the dining area in artist Mur Sherman Hayman’s condo is a portrait she painted of a swashbuckling palace guard in the court of Louis XIV.
The handsome, mustached model for the portrait was Hayman’s husband, Mark Paul. Hayman also painted Paul as a Renaissance bishop and a cowboy. The couple shared a fondness for fanciful art.
Hayman misses Paul, who died of complications from a blood cancer in November. She is grateful to him for creating the comfortable home she shares with Ginger, their Australian Terrier.
The couple moved to the condo at Symphony House five years ago, she said, “my husband reluctantly, and I gleefully.”
They moved from a four-story townhouse just 3½ blocks away, where they had lived nearly 40 years.
The 31-story Symphony House’s name references its proximity on Broad Street to the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, home of the Philadelphia Orchestra.
Mur’s former home required going down and up flights of steps in a courtyard before arriving at her door. Encouraged by an artist and real estate agent friend, Jill Sablosky, Hayman persuaded her husband to downsize.
Once they started looking, she said, her husband’s architect instincts kicked in. He found condo conversions of historic buildings interesting but discovered water damage and other issues.
Hayman’s daughter, Ashley, suggested they look at Symphony House, built in 2008.
Paul and Hayman visited the two-bedroom, two-bath, 12th-floor unit with a balcony and were impressed with the expansive views looking all the way to the Delaware River. After back-and-forth negotiations, they bought the apartment.
“We could now watch fireworks on the river,” Hayman said.
The couple replaced faded maple flooring with oak. After a contractor gave them a “shocking” price for custom work, Paul designed a storage unit in the living room from standard white kitchen cabinets. Above the self-venting gas fireplace, sliding doors hide a television.
A corner shelf is filled with cloisonné, Limoges porcelain, and contemporary pieces from the Clay Studio. A pair of antique deer as well as other vintage objects were gifts from Hayman’s parents, David and Goldie Sherman, who were antique dealers.
“Every time they visited,” Hayman said, “they bought us tchotchkes.”
Inlaid wood furniture and Oriental rugs in the condo came from Hayman’s parents. The concrete lion on the balcony, otherwise furnished with chairs from Wayfair, also came from them.
Among several pieces of abstract art in the living area is a two-dimensional arrangement of multihued rectangles by Hayman.
She found the oak dining table and black dining chairs online. The blue living room couches were purchased from Raymour & Flanigan as was the white furniture in the primary bedroom.
The living-area walls are painted pale gray. And the primary bedroom and bathroom walls are sky blue — a color her husband loved, Hayman said.
Two pink chairs in the bedroom came from her parents, as did Hayman’s dressing table.
“I told my father I needed a drawer, and he had his carpenter make one,” she said.
It would appear the room has an animal theme with paintings of a rabbit, fish, dog, and horse. Over the bed, though, is a floral painting by artist Csilla Sadloch. An intricate maroon, blue, and white paper collage by Carol Moore hangs nearby.
Paul changed the entrance to the primary bedroom to create two dressing rooms instead of one and installed frosted pocket doors.
The walls in the guest bath and bedroom are desert rose, which matches the oriental rug. Paul used the space as a home office with a storage unit he designed on one wall and what appears to be a matching closet on the other. Pulling the handles on the closet doors reveals a Murphy bed.
Like all residents in the building, Hayman has a handsome oak front door with wood trim. In the foyer she has hung six luminescent paper collages by Doug Zucco.
The “dog butt hangers” from a shop in England in the hall are her “favorite things,” Hayman said. They are just the place to hang a wet raincoat, she said, when she returns to her beloved home.
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