MS10
New York, NY
One pill makes you larger...
For this bachelor pad with unrivaled views of the Empire State Building, we pitched a surrealist fantasy with fetishist inclinations, futurist silhouettes and full-throttle color. The resulting reverie is our adult take on a well-known children's novel: a psychedelic fantasy set in a field of lilac where a chair from the set of Star Trek sits alongside wild animal wallpaper and latex-upholstered furniture. Trippy? Sure. But we made it make sense.
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PROJECT DETAILS
• Invigorate apartment with moxie and color to mitigate sterile environment
• Elegantly resolve awkward layout and furniture locations
• Mazimize storage in the primary bedroom
• Create a comfortable work-from-home space
In this former white box, we exploited tensions of hard and soft, sinuous and sharp, rational and psychedelic. Imagine Alice fell down that rabbit hole to find Tom of Finland and Salvador Dali as guests at the Mad Hatter's after-hours tea party hosted in a chic mauve den populated with avant-garde furniture and hallucinatory works of art. We pitched our intepretation of a wonderland derived from our client's wardrobe of vibrant hues and his spirited personality.
Upending traditionally feminine associations of light purple, we swathed the apartment’s walls and ceilings its calibrated hues to cocoon the space in gauzy sensuality and amplify dynamic plays of light and shadow that dance through the space from sunrise to dusk.
The living room's hero, a purple velvet, channel-tufted sectional, was designed to fit the room's proportions precisely. And above a playful composition of lounge furnishings recalling mushrooms and legos, a suggestively bulbous inverted domed wire net chandelier by Rick Tegelaar — the very first of its design shipped to the US — hangs from ice-rink slick high-gloss ceilings.
Amanda Church's swirling, technicolor oil painting pairs with an expressionistic Roger Herman vessel in the dining nook, where a bouquet of candlesticks seemingly plucked from a Dr. Suess landscape perch on a custom terrazzo-topped table.
The primary bedroom's inset wainscoting was matched to existing cherry-toned flooring to unify perpendicular planes and visually expand the room's proportions. Emerging from the wall as a zig-zagging desk and dresser system to gently prompt mpvement through the space, it extends to the perpendicular wall as an illuminated headboard. An irreverent, MHLI-designed latex-upholstered platform bed houses a storage cabinet below for the client's massage table.
In lieu of nightstands, cantilevered razor-thin bronze fins wrap both corners as shelving, providing bedside storage. Wardrobes faced in ribbed bronze mirrored glass occupy a formerly unusable niche. For a crowning touch, and what has become an MHLI signature: color-matched powder coated aluminum valances to veil motorized blackout shades.
This new construction corner unit came with high-end appliances, modern finishes, and windows on two elevations which visually connected opposite ends of the apartment. But an irregular layout made any standard furniture plan impossible, leaving our client to cobble together a temporary fix of mismatched dressers, lamps and miscellaneous furnishings.
We devised a solution to capitalize on 'dead zones' using custom millwork to architecturally integrate living, working, and sleeping functions while providing ample storage opportunities.
Design
8 weeks
Implementation & Construction
15 months
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I had absolutely no clue how to furnish my apartment or even lay it out. In a matter of seconds Marc brilliantly blocked the whole space and assembled precisely the right ingredients to turn my blank, awkward apartment into a true showpiece. I continue to be dazzled every time I open the front door.
Brooklyn, NY