The Queen of Pop, Madonna, is back on the throne today with the release of her new album Confessions II, a follow up to 2005’s Confessions on a Dance Floor. What better occasion to look back on the Grammy-winning singer’s illustrious career and life?
AD visited her New York City apartment for the November 1991 issue. The mother of reinvention first purchased the pad with ex-husband Sean Penn, and later added two more units and gave the home a complete overhaul with help from architect Stephen Wang and her younger brother and frequent collaborator Christopher G. Ciccone. In later years, Madonna and Ciccone would have a falling out, though they found their way back to each other before he lost his battle with cancer in 2024.
“When I finally got the courage to go to New York to become a dancer, my brother followed, and again we took each other’s hands, and we danced through the madness of New York City,” wrote the singer in a tribute to Ciccone after his death. In a podcast interview last year, she confirmed that one song on Confessions II, titled “Fragile”, is about Ciccone.
Below, revisit the NYC home they created together, where Madonna once sent faxes from her office while looking at her Picasso.
“What I wanted most was just to love my environment,” says Madonna of her apartment in an unassuming brick building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. As conceived and executed by the creative hand of Christopher G. Ciccone, her younger brother and most trusted confidant, the apartment is a low-key yet glamorous sanctuary, a place that allows her, once inside, a temporary escape.
Madonna entrusted her brother with the design of her Los Angeles house (she gave him ten days to do it) and never thought of having anyone else envision and execute the New York space. “Who could I have more in common with than someone I grew up with?” Madonna says of her choice of designer. “We like the same things, from music to what we eat.” Although Ciccone has no formal art training, he designed the stage sets for the Blonde Ambition tour, which was the setting for the documentary Truth or Dare, and he is an artist in his own right. But he is wholly self-taught in the area of interior design.
Ciccone knew early on what he wanted to do. “I wanted to create a New York apartment. In Los Angeles the living spaces are big, wide open. There are loft-like attributes to them, and also the feeling of living in a penthouse. In New York I wanted to make a space for her that was elegant without being weak, peaceful without being boring. She prefers New York to Los Angeles because when she’s here she can relax. There’s a city here—you feel you are with people, living with the rest of the world, not confined to an automobile. But it still had to be a place she would feel safe in. Even though there’s a view of Central Park, you don’t feel exposed to anything.”
