Raiza Costa’s Brooklyn Penthouse is so Delicious

Hi, come on in. Hello, Apartment Therapy. Hi, Apartment Therapy. Welcome to my home. My apartment. Welcome to my home in Brooklyn, New York. Yeah, whatever you need, make sure I say it that way, because I am very tricky when I'm talking. I'm like, I go ways you don't expect, and then, fine, I'll cut your line. So, this is the entrance, and this is my library. It is color coordinated, but the most important books are behind these books, because these are the cute ones, but the serious ones, the ones that I truly, truly learned from, they're all hidden behind. This is where I keep my ancestors. Golden frame, my family. White frame, my husband's family. I just wanted to make my family look more special. This is a cute sign. It's a street in Brazil that has a song that I really love. Bua Nascimento Silva 107. And I brought this one from Brazil. Here used to be my room, and then I turned it into my baby's room. Wallpapers are still the same. This one is Nathalie Latte. It's a French illustrator. I didn't change it for him, but I have a crib now. This painting is definitely my favorite item in this room, because a friend of mine who's a painter did it, and it was based in a photo that I have with my baby in the tub, and I love it. He was so little. This is my bedroom with a king-size bed. It took me 15 years to get a king-size bed. And here I have this wallpaper. From the pattern point of view, it's my favorite. I also love these colors. It's very 70s with these leaves falling like this. I'm not sure. It looks like I'm in a botanical garden, something like that, very... I don't know. I don't know how to describe it. But this was the hardest wallpaper to install because it's thick, and somehow I managed to kind of overlap them. You should never do that. Don't overlap your wallpaper. And that happened. I couldn't figure it out. So I love this wall. When I move to a new space, I do have the first priority, which is transforming the walls. I think the walls are the, like, the skin of the... You know, like, objects in a house are the organs of a body, but then the walls are the skin, which is, like, the largest organ we have. So when you transform the walls, you transform the house in a quick, non-expensive way. So these fixtures are inspired by music amps, like guitar amps. And from the texture, which is the texture of the buttons, to the finishing of... So I... It's something I like. I like feeling texture in my hands, so... And if you have an amp, you know, the texture of the buttons are important. It just... It feels special. And I like to feel special to open my very messy closet. It is a light switch, but it's also inspired by amp buttons. These are all original photos from my cookbook. I couldn't throw them away, like I do with a lot of the things that I create. I'm like, I can't throw this piece of paper away. So I framed it. I framed it all together. And this is plexi, because otherwise it would be too heavy. It wasn't recommended that I have glass here. So it's plexi, and it has all the originals from my book. I get a lot of my ideas when I'm actually making something. If I'm, like, cutting paper, I work with paper a lot. I do a lot of stop motion in my studio with an animator, and we fabricate things all the time with, like, paper and scissors. And that thing of, like, cutting paper and measuring and, like, just painting, it's just so meditative that the ideas, they keep coming when I'm doing that. I think that's why I love it. The process is where the sparkle lives for me. Living room, where I sit and read. This is an upright piano that I got in a church a few years ago. And we really like the sound of it, but we also like the wood. So the guy told me that he had sold this piano to someone else, and I bribed the priest with homemade eclair. And I told him that if he delivered to me instead of someone else, I would make him homemade eclairs, and I did. And he brought this here. I'm sorry. Am I going to hell forever? The priest, for sure. But the wood, I just, I mean, this, you know, the living room's not huge. It was the perfect size. We are not, like, professional musicians, so it's good enough for who it is. It's good enough. So my favorite item here is this fried egg that looks so realistic from an artist called Vitoria Arslani. She hand-makes them, and I love this fried egg. Just there, hanging casually on top of my bribed piano. I have my corn, which is a summer favorite. I love to eat corn on top of this corn. It feels like I'm in an infinite loop. And I carry this everywhere, so, like, it's good because you can have a little drink here, but you can use it as a timetable, but you can also use it as a stool, as a stoop. These are some of my favorite photos from projects that I've done, from my book or the TV shows that I've done. I like how they tell a story, like, you know, the creme brulee has been recently, like, broken into pieces, and the caramel's crunchy, the hammer's there. I don't know, I like to tell little stories. That's why I call myself a food storyteller. I like to tell little stories about food and film and food photography as well. What else? I have baby pileas. Whenever a baby pilea is growing, I actually replant them and have new pileas for my friends. I've been giving birth to pileas all year, so they don't stop growing. I've always kept my records since I was little, and this one I've always had with me. It's one of my favorites from Caetano Veloso, Tranza is an album. He's Brazilian, but he made this album. He's in exile in London, and he made this album in English, and somehow it kind of translates to all of my life now, because I'm from there, but I live here, and my friends are from here, but I also, you know, like, it's this merge of, like, two languages and two countries and two cultures. My approach to design is, I know everything that I love, and they not always are cohesive in the same style, and I like that. If I like it, it doesn't have to make any sense. When people come to my house, they're like, oh, that's you. I guess they also can't describe exactly what it is, but it reflects a lot of my personality. I want the contemporary symbols, but I think when a new design drinks in that water of the old, that's when things really become perfect to me. I think there's something there that when, there must be something there that reminds us of the past, and then that's when it really sparks something on me. When I die, I want my house, if my son gets my house, I want him to look at it and be like, yeah, that's definitely from the 2000s, you know? There are two things that I love in this kitchen. First is my stove, my oven, which is, if you cook, you know. And this fridge is really nice too. I love this fridge, and I do most of my meals here. I always keep a notebook with recipes that I like to do in the everyday. I like to write things down on paper, I've always done that, and I think, I want to have lots of, I have lots of notebooks, and when I die, I want my son to know how to make my food, you know? And then I think, but I make cooking videos, he will definitely know how to make, but at the same time, it's not the same, you know, what you're cooking at home, like, my cooking videos are about pastries, and French pastries, and this is what I cook on the everyday, it's like that perfect egg, it's like that, you know, that little dish he loves, it's the gnocchi, it's the minestrone, maybe he's gonna throw it away, it's okay, I won't know, hopefully I won't know. Oh, there's something I love here. I have customized Bialetti that I got from them when I was living in Italy. It says Familia Costa, which is me. Costa, my family. So this is my dining area. I love how this window, it's like a frame, I don't know, it seems like a painting to me, because I can see Empire State Building right there, and it's beautiful, I really like this, I enjoy this. I like my house to be wearable, like, you can touch everything, you can use everything, I don't save good plates for visitors, I always eat in the good plates, and I drink my tea in the good cups, and I use my stuff, but I also don't want them to break, and a two-year-old is capable of doing horrendous things to your objects. This is my terrace where I host a lot of my parties, my gatherings. I wanted to get a vibe from Slim Aaron, which is a photographer. I wanted this terrace in Brooklyn to give Slim Aaron's Palm Springs vibe, and I think I got a little bit of it. With the fringe and my umbrella, I think the fringe helps, and also the stripes, and my pizza oven, where I make pizza. My magic is, like, my most memorable nights in New York. I randomly and very, like, spontaneously invited friends over, cooked for them as they were arriving, and we ate it, and then we did this, and then we danced. I want to hold, like, I want to be like that forever, and I try to remove the pressure of hosting by remembering that as long as I have something to serve, as long as it's something that's true to myself, which is going to be a homemade meal, and as long as we're having a good conversation with interesting people, that's all that matters. So I don't ever want to be one of those, like, perfect, you know, like, oh, here's the champagne, plus this, meh, maybe not, you know. So I think that's where the magic lives. If you have, like, a home that you can bring joy to others, that has such an impact into people's lives. You know, like, I know my friends, they come here, my parents, my mother-in-law, I know I can provide joy just from, like, having this place and, you know, treating it like it's something special.