HOME TOUR | The Colorful, Boho-Chic New York Apartment of Interior Designer Kati Curtis

People typically hire me for color and pattern, that's really what we're known for. And I think the fact that we can bridge that traditional, contemporary, both styles together, that's really what people are looking for and that's something they feel like they can't do themselves so they come to us for that specifically. I'm Katie Curtis, my company is Katie Curtis Design and we are based in New York City and Los Angeles, California. There are three elements to a Katie Curtis design project. There's an element of craft, there's an element of culture and then there are always things that are collected over time or at least look like they were. We are right now in Midtown Manhattan, literally if you took a pin and stuck it in the middle of Manhattan, that's where we are. We're in the zip code 10019, kind of close to what's called billionaire's row. We're in a high rise apartment with amazing light and incredible views which are very important to me. I would prefer pre-war but you're not gonna get that amazing view. So this apartment, when I first found it, like many of the projects we do here in New York City was totally white box and my job initially was to de-white boxify it and I think people often come to us in New York City to do just that. When I first looked at the apartment, I immediately just went to putting the color scheme together with the pink colors. This room in particular is such a great example of how just changing the color can give it a totally different feel. The river, the sky, the urban landscape, that was really the touch point for me for the color scheme itself so that it wouldn't detract from that but still at night, you don't get the colors outside so how does that translate in the evening too and that's something I think people often aren't thinking about. The kitchen is the first thing that you see when you walk in the front door so it almost kind of fades into the background because we have an incredible picture window that looks right out into the Hudson River but what I love about the kitchen is there's a nice complimentary color scheme going on with the cherry cabinets and there's a glass backsplash and we painted the walls to really kind of match that blue-green of the backsplash so there's a nice complement of warm and cool that I think is really serene and again, just lets the view be the star. My living room, you're blown away by the view. The view takes up half of the room so again, we had to think about the color scheme as how it would reflect that in the materials that were chosen. I felt like it was really important to have window treatments, not only to control the sun but to soften it. All the time in New York City with the floor-to-ceiling windows, everything becomes really hard and harsh and I wanted to soften that up with the floral window treatments. I love to use Persian rugs, vintage rugs. We have in the living room two rugs that I picked up from India and those rugs are so beautiful but also durable and hide a multitude of sins. It was almost the way the room was laid out was perfect that we kind of tuck the TV in the background so it's there and we watch it, I admit it but it's not the main star of the show which is definitely the view. So this living room has to serve a lot of functions which is very common in New York City. It serves as a dining room, it serves as watching TV, it serves as the entertainment room so we have a lot of different seating. The key to having a lot of seating though is scale and how it's placed. So these pull-closure home chairs are very narrow, they're only 18 inches deep which is why I love them. They're art sculptural pieces within themselves but they serve as excellent extra dining chairs when we have more than four people at the dining table. Sometimes we like to sit and look at the view so we have this Jens Rizm chair that's upholstered in a cat-proof fabric next to this really fun ottoman. These can also be pulled in front of the sofa if we have guests and it's more conversational setting as well. One of my all-time favorite pieces is an Indian hammered chest. We have two cats and pretty much everyone I know has some kind of animal or child or has parties or drinks coffee or something, some situation where they don't want to have to worry about spilling something or a cat clawing things so a lot of our upholstery is actually cat-proof. This is upholstered in what's called a krypton fabric so the cats actually can't dig their claws into it. The Rizm chairs are as well and they just look like a beautiful ultra suede. You would never know. They can't get their claws into it. There's no excuse now with all these performance fabrics to sacrifice performance for aesthetics at all. It's important to look at colors both in the dark and in the daytime but never, ever, ever and this is a big pet peeve of mine and the best advice I can give anyone is do not ever put a sample of a paint color up on a white wall and try to choose a color because your eye is going to automatically turn that color darker than it's really going to look in real life just because of the contrast. It's the law of color theory because they've seen it on a white background and it looks much darker than it would really look in the entire space. So this room I would call the guest room slash library lately slash Zoom room but this is actually a sofa bed so this is a wonderful guest room for people to stay but we also love to hang out in here as well. This piece behind me has a lot of spiritual meaning that I didn't even know. I picked this up at a market in Fez, Morocco. It's an embroidered silk tapestry and this is a carved wood frame. You know, you could never get this anywhere else and this blue color has so much depth and beauty to it. It just feels so serene. I often feel like people are afraid to use dark colors in small rooms because they feel like it will make the room look smaller when in fact it actually opens up the room and makes it feel more expansive so that was another reason we chose the color for this room and it blends so beautifully into the landscape. The primary bedroom is quite large so we have generous space in there. Wake up every day to the view. Sometimes the moon actually wakes us up at night so sunshade and sun control is a big thing to consider and we do see great sunsets at night as well. There really was only one way to lay out the room which again is really common in New York City. There's one way to put everything, one place to put the dresser, one place to put the bed. There's a little niche where the bed and our nightstands go. Challenge of the primary bedroom was that it has very high ceilings so I didn't want our furniture to feel too dwarfed or too small so you'll notice our headboard is quite high. You're really thinking about scale and how that responds to the ceiling height is very, very important because we have 12 foot ceilings here. The key to mixing styles is to start with base pieces that are also very contemporary. So you'll see we have very simple, clean, modern bed with a modern frame where we can actually tuck the bedding into it. This dresser is a classic mid-century modern piece from William Hinn. The nightstands are linen wrapped, quite contemporary. So the base pieces we have in the room are quite modern and then I mix them in with some vintage lamps that are lapis inlay. These are really incredible. An Asian cabinet that's an antique and this incredible screen I picked up from India. I have a story for almost everything we have in the apartment. I like to collect art not so much for the blue tip value or increased value of it, but just things that I love. I think it's the perfect combination of me, my personality, old and new. I'm gonna wear a floral dress with a biker jacket and combat boots and I love that combo. So it's the perfect expression of that.