Pro Designer Turns an Abandoned NYC Loft into His Dream Apartment | Architectural Digest

I think my best advice to someone designing their own space is think about how you want to live your life. What kind of kitchen do you want to have? Where do you want to drink coffee? Do you want to have six people for dinner? Do you want to have 16 people for dinner? How do you want to have drinks with your friends? Ask yourself all these questions that we ask our clients. I'm doing for myself exactly what I try to do for my clients. Give myself a home that's right for me. Just like I'm trying to help my clients create a home that's right for them. I'm Robert Stillen. I'm an AD100 designer based in New York, and I'm going to take you behind the design of my new loft in Red Hook, Brooklyn. I found out about this loft and this building about eight years ago. I had a close friend of mine who was living in Red Hook, and he and a bunch of his friends were talking about this amazing new industrial loft building on the waterfront, and it was exciting, and I was intrigued. I had been living at that point in Soho for over 10 or 12 years in the same apartment, which was beautiful, but I was looking for a bigger space, and I wanted to live more graciously, and I wanted to have light, I wanted to have space. The minute I came to this building, I was like, I think I'm going to live here. So this building is called the New York Dock Building. It was built in the early 1900s as a warehouse for things coming and going on the ships that still continue to come and go in front of this apartment in this beautiful shipyard. And over the course of time, it ended up being an empty, abandoned building. This is the space, more or less, the way that I bought it. It was completely raw industrial space, which was great for me because I wanted it to be as authentically a loft as I possibly could do. I really wanted this room that we're sitting in right now to feel like a loft. I was much happier to expose all the heating and air conditioning than build a soffit out of drywall to hide it. I kept all the columns. We didn't touch them. If they had graffiti on it, we left them. If they had paint marks on it, we left it. There's all this history here, and I think that that's important in design, and the history, and the age, the patina of things. You're sitting in a chair that's 60 years old, and you're sitting on a rug that's 90 years old. It's not perfect. It has age in it. It has the history of other people who lived on it. And all these things do, and that makes a difference. Like, it's soulful. Yeah, this place is kind of new in the sense that it's all renovated, but all the things and the layers make you feel comfortable. They make you feel at home. They give you a sense of history and a connection to something. When I was working with my architect, Mark Geddes, to sort of come up with a plan for this apartment, I really wanted to keep the loft space on the water side. So this is the layout of this apartment. Over here is New York Harbor. On this side is all of Brooklyn. You get sunrises on the bedroom side. You get sunsets on the loft side. And on the water side, you have these expansive 180-degree views. You're overlooking the entire New York Harbor. We have the shipyards here, the Statue of Liberty, Governor's Island. All the way from the shipyards of New Jersey, lower Manhattan, the Financial District. You can see the Chrysler Building. You can see the Brooklyn Bridge. This is the primary suite here. So it has a very, very, very large, gracious bedroom area that has a whole seating area in it. Very large primary closet. And then the primary bathroom also is a room with a steam shower and a tub, and it has furniture in it. The connection between the west side and the east side doesn't have any natural daylight, so I really wanted to have these portholes so you could have light in there during the day and still be able to create privacy. And I really wanted to live in a loft. So I decided to keep the western exposure, which overlooks all of New York Harbor, as my living space and one gigantic loft space that's sort of kitchen, dining, and living. So this is the loft area of my apartment. This space is like 1,800 square feet, and it's a big, big, big volume. And I know probably to a lot of people that's like a daunting idea. People are like, how did you do that? How did you make this feel so cozy and so comfortable and so natural? One of the things is that you invisibly divide the space up into the spaces that you're going to have. And so there's the kitchen, there's the breakfast, lounge-y kind of area, there's the dining space and the living space, and you almost pretend like there are walls between it. Everything is set up to be comfortable for one person to live here, but also it's flexible. If I have like one or two people over for lunch or coffee, I'll sit here. If I want to have like a drink with someone, I might sit here. It could be a one-on-one, or it could have like 10 or 15 people over there. There isn't one chair or seating surface in this apartment that's not comfortable. I'm still a huge proponent of shopping and seeing things in person and trying them out, and I'm often baffled today when there's so much consumption online of things for the home, and I don't know how people do it. Things are not always the way they look, and things are not always the size they said they were. I can't say to a client they're comfortable unless I sat on them, and I don't want the responsibility of endorsing them if I didn't sit on them. Every single piece of furniture in here, I try it out. I'm a hunter and a gatherer, so I have a tendency to collect lots of things, and I learned at an early point in this business, and also because I was attracted to antiques and vintage and all that, that if you see something today and you really like it and it's unusual, you have to buy it. You're not going to find it in six months when you want it. So that creates this need to have a shop or a gallery and also to create an inventory for all these things so they're available when you want them. So the kitchen is a totally functional kitchen. I wanted to have enough of a kitchen to have the things that I care about. I really do like a big island, and I like to be able to cook for my son and his wife. It's not so much about I have to have a certain range. We use Wolf a lot. I have a big farmhouse sink from Waterworks. I also was lucky enough, because I do have this big gracious space, to have a scullery butler's pantry behind it that has everything that this kitchen doesn't have. I have an extra refrigerator, I have an ice maker, I have lots of extra storage. I like to have things in sight in terms of the cooking things because it's just easy to get them. And I like to have the things around that are usable and functional. And also I think the layering makes things cozier and just has a more organic feeling to it. Too organized and too perfect is not chill. Anywhere in the apartment that you might have a drink, there might be a stack of plates somewhere around there so you can just take them and use them for drinks. I don't have an issue at all about getting a ring on a table, but I like to have coasters. And I don't use coaster coasters. I like to use cool little vintage plates. I have a whole bunch of different ones, and I like to serve a drink on a coaster. So this is my bedroom. I have Brooklyn in front of me. I feel engaged, but I also feel sort of... Red Hook is super peaceful and quiet at the same time. The sun comes up, and there are these beautiful shadows on the wall, on top of the art. It's kind of on the big side, which is why I wanted to move into this apartment. I really wanted to live in a more gracious way. So I've had some parties here, and people love to come into this room and hang out. And if I have 50 people over here for cocktails, people wind over into this room, and my bathroom is really quite large and has this furniture in it. It feels good to sort of like share my life with other people. I have never personally had a bathroom that was quite this large. It's an extension of my room. It's an extension of my life, and I like to take time getting ready. And I sit in that bathroom in one of those chairs a lot. I really love this room because I'm surrounded with so many things that are so meaningful for me and that I've collected over the years, some 20, 30 years ago, some pieces that I just found in the past year or even a week or two ago. This chair, which is designed by the Campana Brothers, who I've known for a long, long time, I really enjoy what they do. Their work has like a sense of humor, and it's functional, and it's beautiful, and it's unusual and unexpected. This chair came up for auction, and it sort of just worked out that I was able to get it, and I'm happy to have it here for those reasons in addition to the fact that it is like an attention-getter and people are so curious about it, and it's actually super comfortable. I'm a big believer in design is great, but if it doesn't function, if it doesn't work, it doesn't really make any sense to me. I'm connected to everything that I have in this apartment. I think I have 300 or 400 works of art in this apartment. I have personally purchased every single one of them. Every single one has a story behind it. There's a lot of relationships with artists, with dealers, auction houses, all the sort of different people that make up the art community and the design community are all woven into the history that is in all these pieces, and I've been doing this business for 30 years and top of my career and all that sort of stuff, but there's also all these other people, designers and dealers and gallerists and those people that they were starting out when I started out, and we were all like we're nobody and trying to make our way in the world, and to have all that history and experience of all those people, I mean, it's all tied to all these things. It's just super meaningful for me to live surrounded by all those things. I have no academic education in this business. I didn't go to design school. I didn't go to architecture school. I didn't go to landscape architecture school. I didn't go to construction school. I didn't go to any of it. I think it's really important to trust your feelings and talk to people that you know in your life that you respect their opinion about that thing. Talk to people who know about design and furniture and art and all that and see what they say and then see how it resonates with you. Get the best advice you can get, but also I think mostly trust your instincts. If you love it and it's functional, it's going to work out. You have to pay attention to the needs and the restrictions and all that that you have in whatever your space is, but if you buy things that you love and you buy things that have purpose and they have function, if you buy a chair and it's comfortable and it's going to be your dining chair and you sit in it and you feel like I could see myself sitting in it and then you pick a table and you do the same thing and you do that for everything, it's going to work out.