I am comfortable in New York City, but I’m a Californian at heart. I would say I’m always happy to pass time on the East Coast, while Rudy falls easily into being a New Yorker and is genuinely most himself in this dense, tightly wound city. This apartment marked a return for us; the previous time we’d lived in New York together, our home had become a kind of homage to the life we’d actually shared in London—we had imported an inward-looking atmosphere, cozy from drizzle and gray. By the time we found this place on 10th Street, in 2014, though, I felt very ready to tackle New York again, both physically and emotionally. It’s true that, between us, this time, we had a goal of creating a home that would speak in the language of the city it was in: frenetic and confident and brash.
The apartment had its structural quirks. It was long and narrow, but also had exceptionally high ceilings and big, south-facing windows (partially blocked by air-conditioning units). But we sensed immediately how to make it work and had the design for the remodel ready within days. I’d just been in Milan for the Salone del Mobile, too, where I saw a presentation of a new terrazzo-like engineered material called Marmoreal created by the English designer Max Lamb for my former colleague Brent Dzorckius’s company, Dzek. By the time we closed on the apartment just a few weeks later, we were already ordering slabs of this new nougat full of bright chips of colored marble to tile our new bathrooms. The process was fluid and easy—a clear sign that we were both ready for this change.
We’d already identified several artworks that we knew we wanted to live with, so we designed the project to maximize display space even in unconventional places, like the kitchen. We also chose to sacrifice a wall that seemed like an intuitive place for a gallery display and converted it to shelving. We (or, rather I—Rudy would say I have a problem in this particular arena) tend to accumulate books with greedy zeal. We commissioned our friend and frequent collaborator, the gifted Brooklyn-based metal whisperer Gabrielle Shelton, to build the most incredible set of steel bookshelves. They seem to float over the wall without any visible support, though Gaby has told me there’s enough structural steel embedded in the wall that I could climb the shelves like a ladder.
Rudy and I are always trying to remove the hierarchies we see regularly imposed on objects. That means humble burlap cloth is promoted to a wall covering and a fitting backdrop for artworks by John Armleder and Wolfgang Tillmans. It means ceramics picked up at flea markets are placed next to bronze bowls by Alma Allen on an experimental carbon fiber coffee table by Jonathan Muecke. Beautiful things are deemed beautiful when we decide they are, not when a brand manager or trend predictor makes a pronouncement. We always want people to feel a real connection to the objects that surround them, to their intrinsic qualities and history. We want them to feel that those objects are extensions of themselves.
Placing our books as a focal point of our home—these volumes that both truly contain and symbolically represent so much of our accumulated experience and knowledge—was a way for us to highlight what matters most to us. I love that this prominent feature of our home, which also provides its central structure, is, ultimately, a tool to help us organize and access our library. It delights me to my core when something so utilitarian can also be so gorgeous, can embody so perfectly that auspicious dialogue between function and pleasure. It’s about as fine a goal as I can imagine for any home.
