Thom Filicia Crafts a Moody Manhattan Apartment with a Head-Turning Collection of Art and Design

The cavernous interior offered plenty of elbow room for the clients to host fundraisers for up to 100, but it also needed to be just as inviting during quiet family movie nights. Filicia set to work giving the rooms soul while maintaining a feeling of airiness. “They didn’t want it to look fully decorated,” he says of the design plan. “They wanted to create a balance between keeping the authenticity of what it was and making it feel beautiful, livable, stylish, and sophisticated.”

To that end, Filicia commissioned custom furnishings such as the Agustin Hurtado dining tables that can be pressed together for one long seating arrangement or separated and stored when it’s just dinner for six. The clients gravitated toward a mix of vintage furnishings and contemporary pieces, including examples that played with scale, including the robust Marcel Wanders floor lamps in the living room and oversize ottomans from Filicia’s collection that extend beyond the boundaries of a pair of console tables in the dining room.

Further removing the gallery-esque atmosphere was the designer’s expert use of color and textures to bring warmth into the rooms. The apartment’s floors were replaced with a visually compelling slate-blue option, while the main bath was sheathed in an arabescato corchia marble from ABC Stone, imbuing the neutral envelope with personality. “It was painterly in a way, so it feels very artful,” he says of latter. “Again, it was that game of making the space feel lofty, but giving them a soul. It was a real exercise in restraint.”

Elsewhere, bedrooms are enveloped in tactile Phillip Jeffries wall coverings, and custom beds made with Schumacher and Holly Hunt fabrics are dressed in linens from Eastern Accents. Plush rugs by Crosby Street Studios pair with creative drapery made using M2C Studios textiles. “My main goal was to create a main suite that wasn’t overwhelming but it still felt intimate and warm,” he says. “It’s kind of simple and modern but also classic and timeless while creating opportunities for a mixture of art.”

Indeed, artworks punctuate both private areas and more public gathering spaces. In the living room, a vibrant Mariana Bushiro canvas animates an otherwise subdued grouping of furnishings, while the dining room boasts a constellation of sculptural forms by Guillaume Gentet. Perhaps the home’s most captivating work of art is a James Turrell Skyspace in the office. “It was really cool to come into a project with that level of art and something that was so interesting and subtle but so dramatic at the same time,” says Filicia of the hypnotic installation. “When you’re bringing in so many different artists, it’s really important that you create these spaces that are simple enough to accept these collections.”

Now that the residence is complete, Filicia is working on a second property for the family in the East End that will undoubtedly have the same “barefoot luxury” as the urban residence. “It has an easiness and an approachability and that’s what I love to do with design,” he says. “You want spaces to be exciting and interesting and dynamic, but at the end of the day, design is for people so when you have children, families, and all of the things that come along with that, you have to create spaces that are not so one-dimensional. Key for them was it needed to feel warm. It needed to feel like a home.”