Open and airy, the apartment on Manhattan's East 12th Street was a real find in the late 1980s, when the building it occupies, a former auction house (circa 1889), was developed into condominiums. Its 24-foot-wide by 42-foot-long double-height space—enormous by New York standards—included a mezzanine sleeping loft above the kitchen and foyer. And its eclectic Mediterranean-style decor, with its arched wall niches and rustic tile, was all the rage. But times change, and when the current owner, a California-based model with a young daughter, decided to try bicoastal living, she wanted more privacy than the layout would allow. She also wanted a new look.
The challenge was how to accomplish these things without compromising the openness of the existing volume and its wall of big arched windows, says designer Suchi Reddy, principal of New York–based Reddymade Design. Her approach was straightforward: strip the room of its awkward and dated details, reposition the stair, and extend the sleeping loft along one side of the room to accommodate a second bedroom up top. Initially, she wanted to create a minimalist space, all white and divided by flowing swathes of felt that could be pushed aside like draperies—a nod to her client's fashion sensibility. But as the crew began demolishing the narrow stair and built-out walls, they exposed a raw steel beam. “When I saw the steel, I realized that the bones of this space were so beautiful, we had to make them central to the design,” Reddy recalls.
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