Space is a commodity most New Yorkers would kill for, but too much of it can induce the same kind of puzzling and head-scratching that a shoebox-size residence might invoke. Such was the case in one 4,000-square-foot apartment in Tribeca. With four bedrooms and three and a half baths, the home had plenty of real estate for the designers at ASH NYC to establish Manhattan myths like a true entry foyer and multiple seating areas, but it also claimed an expansive brick wall that ran some 250 feet—nearly the span of a football field—along the length of the apartment, touching most of its public areas to varying effect.
“It was red brick that looked like it was sponge-painted white, appearing pink,” says Will Cooper, chief creative officer of ASH NYC. “I suggested that it needed to be painted out to match the wall color in the rest of the apartment.”
It wasn’t the only challenge to contend with. To accommodate the scale of the home, Cooper and his team designed ever increasing numbers of custom furnishings, including a cantilevered shelving system in the living room that was so massive it required support from the building’s joists. “Some of the lighting was so large that getting them into the apartment was a logistical nightmare,” says Cooper.
“We inserted the custom oak case good in the entry, directly off the elevator, to act as a sort of partition and separation of space,” says Cooper. “This creates an arrival sequence as you exit the elevator into the apartment.”
Even more troublesome was creating a custom rug to fit the space, a hand-knotted silk and aloe from Nepal. “It’s nearly 25 by 20 feet—larger than a palace-size rug,” says Cooper. “The plane that arrived at the factory to pick it up was not big enough. Needless to say, it was another month of logistics to finally land the rug in the U.S. and get it installed.”
But the wealth of space also afforded Cooper some luxuries, namely a layout that emphasizes privacy—“I feel like it takes 10 minutes to walk from the front to the back, though I have never actually timed it,” he says—and enough breathing room to allow decor from different periods to blend harmoniously. “I love creating a room with a menagerie of pieces and objects that historically would never live in the same space,” says the designer. This eclectic mix is perhaps demonstrated best in the living room, where an Olivier Mourgue chaise longue, an Italian modern lamp, a 19th-century Swedish pinewood and birch bench, and contemporary art achieve unexpected balance. “In my mind it was warm but interesting American Psycho.”
In the end, there was nothing psychotic about the multifaceted assortment of styles, or the intimacy ASH NYC was able to cultivate on such a large scale. It’s still a place where the homeowner can take his coffee and read the paper in the morning—albeit with a little more space to stretch out than the average New Yorker has.
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