SPOTLIGHT: Food Architects - Making Old Feel Avant-Garde Again
I was thumbing through the February 2024 Architectural Digest over the weekend, a magazine that I read more to keep up on what is current in the American celebrity design world rather than as a source of inspiration, and I came across a feature that stopped me in my tracks. It was such a refined and streamlined mash-up of periods and styles, done with an incredible level of aesthetic and conceptual rigor—I know, scary words, but—I can’t think of another worthy description for such an ambitious and fully-realized project.
I wanted to share it with you because the apartment does something so rare: it invites you into a space where time feels suspended, the outside world falls away, and where everything from room to room seems to tell a story that is simultaneously continuous and mysteriously ambiguous. It’s radicalism is that it does so quietly, like a whispered suggestion of possibility, without hitting you over the head with unlivable strangeness or a boilerplate brand of the designer’s hand.
It’s such an escape and in such high taste! And the collection, spanning known and unknown artists, mediums, categories, and centuries, is a global amalgamation of the highest order. A dream collection. Take a peek, I hope you find something wonderful in this other world created by Food Architects and Charlap Hyman & Herrero tucked away somewhere above the streets of SoHo.
Proving there is poetry in collected interiors and timelessness, through the suspension of time, is fresh and modern.
A circa 1600 painting of Salome Receiving the Head of John the Baptist by Hendrick de Somer hangs heavily over a carpeted conversation pit, like an invitation to 1001 Nights, while the cork-tiled wall references both 1960s architecture and tessellated stonework of a grand antique building.
Chrome and glass partitions delineate zones and transitions. The aluminum mini-blinds, something I usually can’t stand, are a genius touch, here. They provide partial privacy and serve to disrupt our expectations of a domestic space, begging the question, what was this building before?
I can’t get over how perfect this terrazzo table by Ficus Interfaith is, especially in combination with those antique scrollwork Biedermeier chairs that evoke recollections of Ionic capitals.
A detail of the details, including those wonderful enigmatic Piranesi etchings. Giovanni Battista Piranesi was an 18th century artist and architect widely regarded as the greatest graphic artist of his time who created the famous series of etchings "Carceri d'invenzione" (Imaginary Prisons) that have inspired generations of artists and draftsmen.
The Gothic Arch, from "Carceri d'invenzione" (Imaginary Prisons), ca. 1749–50, Metropolitan Museum of Art.
A sculpture by Eli Ping, an artist devoted to the metaphysical exploration of gesture and reduction, serves as a vertical counterpoint to the loft’s fluted column. An 18th century verdure tapestry defines the wall behind the bed, cocooning the “bedroom” from the rest of the apartment.
A 1920s Senufo bird in the primary bedroom next to a pair of artworks by David Ostrowski
A vintage plaster foot of Hercules in the primary bath punctuates the contemplation shower with metaphysical question of an Ozymandian order.
The Emerald City. I am into monochrome dressing right now, and am loving how this translates to a dressing room.
An artwork by Anne Libby in the kitchen. I love how the fluted walls act as a sculptural element creating rhythmic energy and moments of pause throughout the apartment.
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