The easily digestible story is that Audrey Gelman resigned as chief executive of the Wing in 2020, withdrew to the Hudson Valley of New York, and took refuge in nostalgia.
She licked her wounds, reflecting on the accusations of inequity and racism at the company she co-founded. The Wing was a chain of co-working and events spaces for women that captured national attention, expanding from one location to 11 in three years. But it also polarized the millennial cohort it sought to recruit, and when it fell short of its feminist “utopia” promise, Ms. Gelman was ousted.
In country kitsch, Ms. Gelman found comfort, then purpose. She returned to Brooklyn, where she still owned a home with her husband, a start-up president turned psychoanalyst, and opened a small store called the Six Bells in 2022. She sold antiques and handmade goods meant to conjure a slow, bucolic life: taper candles, spongeware vases, frill pillows mismatched to perfection.
To Ms. Gelman, the store felt safe, like a “cozy sort of womb,” she said. The entrepreneur whose brainchild had once attracted a $365 million valuation — who had named a conference room in San Francisco after Christine Blasey Ford and a phone booth in Washington after Shirley Chisholm — was now content collecting woven Longaberger baskets and dreaming up fictional English villagers to inspire the shop.
But this story is not quite right. It assumes that when Ms. Gelman relinquished control of the Wing, she yielded some of her ambition, too; that the “girlbosses” were going “tradwife”; that her desire to build big businesses dried up when she pivoted to chintz and craft.
Had we learned nothing from Martha Stewart, another exacting boss? Chintz and craft can build an empire. Ms. Gelman, who started the Wing with no prior business experience, was not wired for smallness. (Metaphorically. Physically, she is five foot one.)
“I’m kind of a hard-driving person, in terms of building things and wanting to be generative,” Ms. Gelman, a 38-year-old mother of two, said over breakfast in April, a tweed blazer over her cable-knit sweater.
The Wing’s aesthetic outlived its business, which shuttered in 2022. The company had helped popularize a look somewhere between “cool” and corporate, like a pastel adult playpen. Its DNA can still be found in dentist offices, craft breweries and all-day cafes — anywhere a terrazzo table sits beside a blob-shaped chair in bright, natural light, probably near a neon sign or color-coded bookshelf.
“Audrey has always had an ability to see what’s coming down the pipeline in a pretty uncanny way,” Lena Dunham, her longtime friend, wrote in an email.
When Ms. Gelman called an investor to float her next big idea, he teased: “Uh oh, the creature is back,” recalled Ben Lerer, managing partner of Lerer Hippeau, a venture capital firm. “This is what I was hoping for.”
Over several interviews with The New York Times, the creature unveiled her plans. Under the Six Bells name, Ms. Gelman is opening a 11-room “countryside inn” in the small town of Rosendale, N.Y., on June 16. But it is likely to be just the first of multiple hotels, part of a new hospitality brand meant to appeal to travelers who, like her, yearn for the past.
Before Ms. Gelman had even opened her store, “cottagecore” was trending, amplified during the homebound, bread-baking days of the pandemic. For the hotel, she worked with an interior designer, Adam Greco, to push that style further.
The result: a hallucinatory boardinghouse furnished by a flea market picker and haunted by Ichabod Crane.
The rooms are almost entirely shoppable: scalloped rattan coffee tables from England ($2,250); mattresses from Massachusetts (starting at $1,349); hand-painted dinner plates ($59) from Italy; a thrifted pig-shaped cutting board ($55).
What is missing from the Six Bells is any explicit political or social cause. Ms. Gelman’s career has been marked by these causes, from her earliest days as a Hillary Clinton campaign press aide to her years running the Wing — her first swing at world-building.
In that fantasy world, women had board seats and book deals, leaning in or on each other to get ahead. Her new world harks back to eras when a woman’s domain was her home, before she had suffrage or a credit card.
“You can admire 18th-century wallpaper without subscribing to 18th-century politics,” Ms. Gelman said, suggesting the Six Bells as more of a paracosm than a historically accurate diorama.
“I do kind of think that the Six Bells has an underlying cause,” Ms. Gelman continued, pushing back gently, by her standards. (Sometimes she pushed back against a question by crying out: “Good god, no!”)
“Preserving things that feel human in a world where everything is becoming automated,” she said. “Creating anything analog today is like a stand of its own.”
The Performance
Antiquing seems like a leisurely activity until you do it with a professional. She does not browse. She is a heat-seeking missile with spreadsheets, swatches and the surety of her own taste.
One day in March, inside a former shoe factory near Hershey, Penn., I watched a moss green cabinet with two human legs lurch toward me. Ms. Gelman was navigating on instinct alone, head obscured by the furniture she carried, balanced improbably against her torso.
Ms. Gelman learned the “picker mind-set” from her 95-year-old grandfather, she said, whom she followed to estate sales and thrift stores as a child.
The Six Bells was inspired by him: a resourceful “street Jew,” in her words, who worked odd jobs. In 1986, he built a farmhouse near Hudson, N.Y., which the family sold a decade later. When Ms. Gelman bought back the property recently — a life goal, she said — she discovered the interim owners had kept some of his cow knickknacks. (She is finalizing the sale of her previous upstate home.)
She grew up in Morningside Heights, the daughter of a therapist and microbiologist. She was a middle-school goth, she said, wearing black lipstick and steel-toed boots to her first boyfriend’s heavy metal shows on Long Island. (She still listens to metal.)
Ms. Gelman has a gallows humor. While stopping to browse Pokemon cards for her 6-year-old son at the antique mall, she told me she had collected Beanie Babies as a child, until her family discovered the lifeless body of their cat hiding in a pile of them.
The start of high school coincided with Sept. 11, 2001, which was “formative,” Ms. Gelman said. Another city kid described the experience like this: “Millennials from New York are a special breed,” said Nelini Stamp, an activist raised on Staten Island who befriended Ms. Gelman during Occupy Wall Street. “You have to understand that there’s going to be some damage and trauma in a lot of us.”
Ms. Dunham, also city-bred, attended Oberlin College with Ms. Gelman. One day, in class, Ms. Gelman lit a cigarette at her desk, following instructions from her political science professor. Her classmates were being tested, Ms. Dunham recalled: “It was an attempt to get the group to examine their willingness to self-govern. She carried it off flawlessly.”
Ms. Gelman first became a character in New York media in 2011. Then the 23-year-old press secretary to Scott Stringer, Manhattan’s borough president, she was described as a “petite beauty” by The Post, which also mentioned her tattoos, including “Lets Go Mets” (sans apostrophe) on her inner bottom lip. Her relationship with a well-known fashion photographer (now disgraced) also kept her name in the tabloids.
Although she was widely reported as the inspiration for Marnie on Ms. Dunham’s 2012 series “Girls,” Ms. Gelman cringed at the comparison. Marnie was Type A but aimless. By the time the Wing took off in 2016, Ms. Gelman said she barely recognized the new character she was performing in public — “the inspiring businesswoman who can also hang.”
“I remember Audrey being this very shiny founder that was on all of the magazine covers,” said Sharmadean Reid, then a London-based beauty entrepreneur, who met with various female founders on a visit to New York. “I would always be like, ‘I’m never going to be that glamorous and successful.’” (Ms. Gelman, “the most normal” of the bunch by Ms. Reid’s estimation, became an angel investor in her start-up.)
Privately, Ms. Gelman made fun of her own persona, she said. “I just remember having a baby, and everyone sent me those ‘baby feminist’ books. I was like, ‘I’m never going to read these to my kid.’”
Her scrappy inner imp never really emerged on those magazine covers or business panels. On Twitter (now X), Ms. Gelman once told a friend of mine who posted derisively about the Wing to “eat a bag of” male genitalia; after the “Red Scare” podcast mocked Ms. Gelman and the Wing’s “coastal elite, pink-pussy-hat feminism,” she befriended the hosts.
From a historical perspective, “the people I’m most interested in always have a great controversy section of their Wikipedia,” Ms. Gelman said. “Particularly the women.”
The Fable
To open the hotel, Ms. Gelman raised about $3.8 million from a dozen investors — including herself, though she declined to provide individual amounts.
Raising money came naturally to her, even under trying conditions. In September 2019, almost immediately after giving birth, Ms. Gelman learned she needed to raise about $50 million in a matter of weeks. WeWork, which owned 20 percent of the Wing, was crashing, and she had to find investors to take over its stake. She was still in her hospital bed.
The funders behind the Six Bells do not appear to have the same expectations that dogged the co-working boom and bust.
Mr. Lerer, the investor, signed on to back Ms. Gelman when the Six Bells was merely a vibe — an amorphous idea in her head, inspired by folksy themed destinations like the Vermont Country Store, or Disney parks’ Main Street U.S.A.
“Forces of nature can impose their will,” Mr. Lerer said.
He still doesn’t know whether Ms. Gelman is building the next Restoration Hardware or Magnolia or Canyon Ranch or Four Seasons, he said. But Mr. Lerer did introduce her to Jeremy Selman, a developer of buzzy hotels, including the NoMad, Freehand and some Ace locations, who eventually became Ms. Gelman’s business partner.
Mr. Selman had never worked on a property so small, he said. “But the whole idea of being able to merchandise the building was very compelling to me,” he said, sitting in a third-floor suite named the Lamplight. “It has to feel like somebody’s imagination is coming alive.”
Each room was based on a character or fable invented by Ms. Gelman. The Lamplight told a forbidden love story between a vicar and a noblewoman. And the inn itself was the fable of Ms. Gelman: an escape tunnel that looped around into a comeback.
Mr. Lerer encouraged her to move at her own pace, aware of what he called her “PTSD” from the Wing. “The bet is that you’re going to get all that confidence back and get that chip on your shoulder and get aggressive,” he said.
Brian Chesky, the co-founder and chief executive of Airbnb and another Six Bells investor, effusively told Ms. Gelman she was “born” to start another company, he said, calling her a “generational talent” on par with Sam Altman of OpenAI and Whitney Wolfe Herd of Bumble.
“I wouldn’t let what played out last time drive your future,” he advised her.
Ms. Gelman was reluctant to share details of her life immediately after being forced out of the Wing. Sitting still was difficult. Within weeks, she approached the manager of an upstate diner, asking for a job.
Waitressing was “incredibly challenging and hard and physical,” Ms. Gelman said. It also made her feel useful, and prevented her from looking at her phone so much. She watched N.F.L. coaches give pep talks in “Hard Knocks,” the HBO docuseries. She was sent the essay “Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood,” and tracked down a 1976 copy of Ms. magazine in which it first appeared.
In the essay, Jo Freeman described having unhealed “wounds” from attacks by other feminists — “a pervasive, irrational certainty that says if I stick my neck out, it will once again be a lightning rod for hostility.”
Ms. Gelman initially viewed the Wing as “a personal failure.” That has eased with time. She now sees herself as a “control freak” who lost control, she said. She couldn’t have eyes on every location. She lacked the foresight to invest in better operational leadership. She was juggling the needs of investors — who envisioned the Wing in China — with the needs of members — who wanted trigger warnings added to every book in the library.
Ms. Gelman still has critics who point to her blind spots around privilege and whiteness, which she acknowledged at the Wing. Plenty of people also believe the female founders who were under fire in 2020, including Ms. Gelman, should not have ultimately resigned.
Tina Brown, former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, said she found the treatment of Ms. Gelman “unfair,” offering her this reassurance: “That always happens to prominent women who put themselves out there. You have to expect to have your head shot off.”
Two things can be true, said Ms. Stamp, a Wing member who wanted to support Ms. Gelman, her friend, but also the employees of color who accused her of discrimination and dysfunction. “I do think she has grown,” she said. “But I also know that people are still harmed.”
When she heard about the new business, Ms. Stamp wanted to be sure Ms. Gelman was prepared for fresh scrutiny.
I posed the question to Ms. Gelman about a week before the hotel’s opening. “I guess I’ve learned that you can’t control how people see you,” she replied. “But you can control what you build.”
Jessica Testa covers nontraditional and emerging media for The Times.
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