WEB-EXCLUSIVE HOME TOUR

Inside White Lotus Star Michael Imperioli’s Little Slice of History in New York City

The home of The Sopranos actor and his interior designer wife, Victoria, wouldn’t look out of place among the palazzos seen on season two of HBO’s latest hit

By Rachel Wallace

Photography by Ashok Sinha

January 26, 2023

Over the phone, Michael Imperioli’s voice is extremely calming. The slight annoyance in the tone of his White Lotus character Dominic Di Grasso—directed at his father (played by F. Murray Abraham), whom Dominic blames in part for his own marital failings, and at his son (played by Adam DiMarco), who is a hard-to-look-at reflection of himself—is completely absent. The braggadocian cadence that covers up the adrift soul of his Sopranos character, Christopher Moltisanti, is also nowhere to be found.

Instead the actor is measured, soft-spoken, and clearly quite secure. He and his wife Victoria Imperioli have been married for 27 years. Their youngest child is now 22, and the couple are enjoying this chapter as empty nesters in a two-bedroom apartment in New York City. The style they both gravitate toward—let’s call it Old World chic—is something they didn’t even need to discuss when they recently downsized, trading in their large Santa Barbara, California, family house in favor of a place that brought them back to their East Coast roots. It’s also reminiscent of their former New York City home, which was featured on the March 2003 cover of Architectural Digest.

Actor Michael Imperioli in the living room of his New York City home.

“I don’t need to tell her anything, she knows what I need,” Michael says of his wife, an interior designer and set designer who outfitted their current pad around their extensive collection of art. It ranges in provenance from the Enlightenment to the 1930s, much of it unsigned and picked up in antique shops over nearly three decades. The space evokes a bygone age with clear Italian influences, not unlike the Sicilian palazzos in The White Lotus. “To me this apartment is a refuge from the world,” Michael says. “It’s representative of the past. This could easily be an apartment from the Jazz Age in New York around when it actually was built a hundred years ago.”

Back then, their building was a hotel, which means the kitchen is on the smaller side (relatable for many New Yorkers), but although Michael is an avid cook who once won the Chopped Tournament of Stars, he’s quite low-maintenance when it comes to that space. “I don’t like gadgets and things like that. I’ve had the same set of knives for 20-something years,” he says. For Victoria, the building’s past served as inspiration. She designed the space as if it were “a beautiful hotel suite,” she says, speaking particularly about the living room, which is done in rich tones of gray to allow the art to pop. “Now that we have no kids living with us, I just wanted something that’s sexy.”

The hotel-inspired decor is especially fitting considering how much the couple travels. Last year, when Michael filmed The White Lotus season two in Taormina, Sicily, Victoria came along, exploring the area and marveling at the testa di moro pottery on the balconies, the nearby medieval village of Castelmola, and just the striking antiquity all around. “When we travel in Europe, we feel like we always fit right in because there’s so much history. There’s so much imbued with a very profound sense of beauty,” Victoria says.

Works from older periods of western art history in particular, she explains, were less about self-expression for the artist and more about capturing the earthly and the otherworldly. This speaks to her deeply. “Subject matters were always very spiritual. They were infused with things that had philosophical and spiritual value,” she says. “That’s why it’s very inspiring and it’s beautiful to live with, because it opens a door to a dimension that we very rarely touch upon as moderns.”

Michael and Victoria’s deep connection to the past is especially interesting given the fact that they are both practicing Buddhists. One of the tenets of the religion—which arose in ancient India and spread to Tibet, and later across the world—is the concept of samsara, or the cycle of death and rebirth that occurs until nirvana is reached. In Tibetan Buddhism, which the Imperiolis practice, the lamas (or spiritual leaders) are considered to be far along in their journey to the end of samsara. Their teacher is His Eminence Garchen Triptrul Rinpoche, whose picture appears in what Victoria calls “the Buddha room,” a former walk-in closet they converted into a meditation space.

“I made a huge sacrifice,” she jokes, “but it is truly the most important [room] for both of us. In the morning, a lot of times, we will meditate together. That’s the very first thing that we do.” The room is decorated in traditional yellow and red with religious paintings called thangkas that Victoria had made during a trip to Nepal in 2017.

“A lot of meditators go into little caves when they go on retreat, and it kind of reminds me of that,” Michael says. “It draws your mind into a quiet place just being there.” This kind of serenity is especially precious amidst the chaos of New York City, but the Emmy-winning actor and his wife are happy to be back in the Big Apple. “Living in New York without raising kids is a lot easier,” he says. “Having that kind of freedom and flexibility and spontaneity with the two of us has been really fun.”

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Michael’s wife of 27 years, interior designer Victoria Imperioli, decorated the apartment.
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Victoria had the hallway wallpaper in storage before using it here. “If I see something exceptional, I will buy a lot of it. More kind of classically themed things, they’re sometimes a little bit hard to find.”

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The main living room centers around a large print of a 19th-century German painting. The coffee table is a Baker piece.
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Behind Michael is the centerpiece of the dining room: an unsigned oil painting of Saint Barbara. “My favorite piece of art in the apartment, because Michael gave it to me,” Victoria says. “That was one of the three pieces of art he gave to me when we got married.”

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The French Art Deco dining room table and chairs were purchased from John Koch Antiques. “I was told it is from 1926, the same year as our residence was built,” Victoria says.
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The kitchen was also mostly renovated when the Imperiolis moved in. The cabinets, however, were refurbished by Victoria. “There was really no point in changing the cabinets; they were great. It’s very hard to find real wood cabinets these days,” she says. The birch tree wallpaper—a reminder of her native Ukraine—was something she’d been holding onto until the right opportunity to use it arrived.

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“I like modern art, but I don’t like living with it,” Michael says. “I like being transported to another time, in a way, in the home.”
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“In Michael’s office, I added a little bit of the blues with the grays because those are really good colors for intellectual work,” Victoria says. The two large painted screens on the walls were painted by Victoria’s late father, Ryszard Chlebowski, and were once used at Studio Dante, the small theater owned by the Imperiolis in the early 2000s.

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In addition to serving as a writing room, Michael’s study is also where he practices music under the watchful eye of Santa Caterina, the bust clad in red beads that he and Victoria purchased in Taormina, Sicily, while he was there filming The White Lotus. (Michael’s band, Zopa, released their first album in 2021.)
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“The Buddha room” features hand-painted thangkas surrounded by red and gold brocade. “The master does the faces and the hands of the deities. Then the students in the workshop finish off all the details. It’s exactly the same as it was 2,500 years ago,” Victoria says.

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“The yellow in the bedroom is so that when you wake up, you always have this kind of sunshine. In New York, we’re often deprived of the sun for a long, long time. I wanted something that’s very soothing, that has that a mood and a feel when you open your eyes,” Victoria says.
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Upon moving in, the Imperiolis gut-renovated the bathrooms in the home. “As much as I love history, I feel the services should be always new,” Victoria says.