Conspicuous Coffee Tables Iman

Iman. The name alone grabs you, forces you to take notice. In her native Somalia, it means magnet. No wonder Peter Beard was drawn to her ten years ago on the streets of Nairobi, and turned Iman into an international star of the modeling world. As she recalls, "I was just walking, minding my business. He wasn't." Today her East Side brownstone is filled with treasures of the Dark Continent, most notably her coffee table—a zebra-skin drum on which rests a Balinese tea set designed for her by Issey Miyake.

Wife of basketball star Spencer Haywood, and mother of Zulekha ("precious"), seven, Iman is more than just a great beauty. She represents the U.N. for special projects and is active in Ethiopian famine relief, eager to spread the word that the solution to the centuries-old drought must be ecological measures, not simply money or food: "Nobody is thinking about long-term relief: land assistance, health care, stabilization of population. It's this amount of land and this amount of people. You can feed them, but if you don't do anything about the land, they're just going to have another drought." Iman is insulted by the recent rash of charity drives, most notably Warm, a fund-raiser sponsored by the modeling business: "They'll have a fashion show so they can go to sleep thinking, I've done a good deed. That means feeding someone one day and not knowing where their food will come from the next! They're doing it for themselves! I am not going to be a part of cocktail talk, some P.R. trip." She glances momentarily at the African painting behind her, a memento of her roots—a memento mori. "It hits right home. This thing hits me right at home."

Last year, Iman endured her own misfortune, a severe car crash while in a taxi. "Some fool just ran the red light and hit us. Broke half my face, my ribs, my collarbone, and everything." She has come through it unscarred, attributing the accident to fate: "I felt it for months before it happened to me. Like somebody out there telling you you're messing up. When you start a negative circle, you have nowhere to go. You can't stop it, or break it. You just have to finish the circle, close it, and start another. I knew that it was going to be one hell of a closing." Brooks Peters