Studio Liaigre Crafts a Refined Manhattan Apartment to Complement a Stunning Art Collection
Inside the Greenwich Village penthouse, a sumptuous array of materials support striking works by Keith Haring, Robert Rauschenberg, Agnes Martin, and more
Most interior designers with urban clients who live high above the city are tasked with making the most of the breathtaking view outside the windows. But when those clients are long time collectors of blue-chip art, that directive gets turned right around.
“I needed to create an interior that was equal to the art without upstaging it. The apartment had to function like a jewelry box,” says Studio Liaigre’s Sarah Mathieu, who spent more than five years transforming a Greenwich Village penthouse into a space that feels like home for both her clients and their enviable assemblage of contemporary art.
The challenge was to avoid any impulse to turn it into a cool white box, but for Mathieu, the apartment’s interior architecture provided solid footing. The building, designed by British architect David Chipperfield, is a minimalist interpretation of the early 19th-century townhouses synonymous with the neighborhood, with pure lines and little ornamentation. “One of my goals was to work in concert with the context of the building itself, largely out of respect for it, but also to eliminate yet another element that might compete with the art,” says Mathieu.
Constraints, she concedes, are good. “They forced me to be more creative, more imaginative and helped to clarify and define this unique space,” she says. Where one might see a limitation in the central core of the building that runs through the apartment (it houses two elevators and a service staircase), Mathieu saw an opportunity; her team designed a series of interconnected rooms around it, then clad the core in sanded cedar panels. “They catch the light from the windows around the perimeter to show the subtle textural changes in the cedar,” she says.
Subtlety is a mantra here, but only when it comes to the interior design. At the outset, her clients shared with Mathieu a complete list of pieces in their art collection. “We immediately saw that the majority of the works were very colorful and bold, so we approached the interiors like an ecran, or screen against which they are set,” she says.
To that end, she paid great attention to how the art would be hung and lighted. Flexibility was key, since the couple wanted to rotate art in and out of the apartment as they wished. On the top floor, tracks of lighting allow for spotlights to change. Elsewhere, chains hang from picture rails, eliminating the need to drive nails into the walls each time a framed piece is swapped out. “We looked at how museums and galleries displayed their collections, and scaled the designs to the space,” says Mathieu.
It helped that the clients are inspired, design loving people. “Their knowledge, kindness, and collaborative nature really nourished us,” says Mathieu. They chose Studio Liaigre for its design vocabulary: a material-, finish-, and texture -forward language perfectly suited to directing attention to works by Alexander Calder, Jean Dubuffet, Joan Miró, and Agnes Martin among others, with a perfect measure of elegance and gravitas.
Natural materials—wood, leather, silk, stone, and plaster—passed through the hands of craftsmen, imbue the spaces with tranquility, all the better to focus on the pieces by Robert Rauschenberg, Philip Guston, Giacometti, and Keith Haring.
It is a beguiling place, this gallery in the sky, where Studio Liaigre has turned living with art into an art form itself.
Studio Liaigre Crafts a Refined Manhattan Apartment to Complement a Stunning Art Collection
