More Magazine – Monique Greenwood

Monique Greenwood

Monique Greenwood, the editor-in-chief of Essence, is also the proprietor of the Akwaaba Mansion Bed and Breakfast in Brooklyn’s historic black community of Bedford-Stuyvesant. Audrey Edwards visits her in the Italianate mansion she shares with her husband, Glenn Pogue, and their daughter, Glynn.

Doing it all “I’m working really hard now so I can have the lifestyle I want in retirement, one with true freedom of time. I’m forty-one, and I think of the next decade as my building years.”

Fatal flaw “Sometimes I forget that not everyone is going to work the way I do, or be as driven as I am.”

Turning 40 “I went away by myself to Cape May, New Jersey, checked myself into somebody else’s B&B, sipped somebody else’s tea and let somebody else make me breakfast.”

Mix master “I really think Victorian and African pieces coexist nicely. They both have strong lines and give a warm feeling and a sense of longevity and history.”

Shopping trail “I buy locally at the antique shops on Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue, and when I travel. My antique gardening tools [below] are from Ghana and I bought my dining room chairs in North Carolina.”
Staying in the hood “My mother birthed me in Washington, D.C., but I feel I was born in Bedford-Stuyvesant. I moved here right after college and just fell in love with the brownstones and the brown people who live in those brownstones.”

Guilty pleasures “Buying antiques and doing house tours. I love looking at other people’s homes.”

March 2001