Ellin Saltzman Sells Apt 12A in Carlyle House for $4.7 M.

For seven decades, Ellin Saltzman has lived in the eight rooms of apartment 12A at East 77th Street’s Carlyle House. “It’s where my parents lived, it’s where I was brought from the hospital when I was a baby,” said the longtime Glamour editor and Saks fashion director. “It’s where my children were brought up.”

But according to city records, Ms. Saltzman has sold the apartment for $4.7 million to Peter and Jill Melhado. “I really didn’t need all the space, and I needed something that is me,” she said. “And it was very filled with memory, and change is good. And certainly change after seven decades is very good.”

Ms. Melhado’s father is John Fairchild, the legendary Women’s Wear Daily publisher. “I knew her when she was a little girl,” Ms. Saltzman said. As for her own parents: “My father died when I was in college, and my mother died the year I graduated from college,” she said, “so the apartment was mine.”

Instead of fleeing far away now, she’s paid $1.995 million for a four-room apartment a few floors down. Her seller, Shannon Hamm Warner, married John W. Warner IV this year—his dad is the Republican senator from Virginia and his grandpa is Paul Mellon.

Upper East Side blood still runs deep-sea blue. “The stationary stores are gone, but in most ways it’s very similar,” Ms. Saltzman said about her environs.

She shared the apartment with interior designer Renny Saltzman from their marriage in 1960 (though they temporarily lived elsewhere) until his death in early 2000. Their old housekeeper reportedly called him “Mr. S,” though weirdly that was also a nickname for Ellin’s father.

“My husband was a terrific interior designer, so the apartment is his style, or was his style, entirely.” That means the wood-paneled library was dark-green with a paisley carpet, the master bedroom was decorated in red and navy jersey in the 1970’s, and, in the 1990’s, the dining room was upholstered in brown patent.

“His look was always evolving,” Ms. Saltzman said, “and so was the apartment.”

She spoke from the Hamptons, where in the late 1960’s Richard Meier built the Saltzmans a second home, which The Observer has called “a Cubist ghost ship,” plus one of the “10 best houses” in the neighborhood.