Loft on West Broadway

West Broadway, Manhattan, New York, NY, United States

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Loft on West Broadway

West Broadway, Manhattan, New York, NY, United States

Firm

YEAR

2009

The recent renovation of the loft transforms a typical 70’s open shoe-box space, into a unit for a growing family with flowing common living spaces, a bedroom for their boy Massimo, a large multi-purpose master suite and what is referred to as the “family office”.
The design takes full advantage of the previous renovation found vestiges such as the exposed stained ceiling , the brick walls and the carefully restored bathroom, entirely tiled in “ found” Enzo Mari’s seventies tiles.
Five new aluminum sleeves, cut into the 2’ thick masonry wall, amplify daylight, a new raw steel fireplace enclosure, at once conceals and reveals the original utilitarian found brick fireplace pit. The living room is equipped with Knoll credenzas and two ten feet long sofas, one being custom designed by Florence Knoll in the 50’s, the other being a rare Poltrona Frau leather unit designed in the 80’s by Massimo Vignelli. The backdrop is the original brick wall, once an exterior wall, still showing traces of last century painted signage.
The kitchen is classic Bulthaup, the dining room table and library are constructed out of the beams of a demolished SoHo loft building, now a new TRA building, 44 Mercer. The Lilliputian kid computer table is made of ultrathin shimmering Trespa sheets, cut in a shape reminiscent of an airplane wing, an other of TRa's signature materials.
The remix of contemporary, vintage and custom furniture, selected pieces from the 50’s and 60’s Venetian artistic glass collection, the selection of modernist furniture and everyday objects (including Vignelli’s dinnerware and a collection of vintage Camerino handbags, also from Venice) and the exhibited art, are an example of TRA’s “curated interiors”, where the selection is very much about what is there as about what is not, in a editing process similar to the one of an artist that juxtaposes found objects.
The enthusiastic, dynamic, power of color and the “lightness of order” is typical of both Robert Traboscia’s “minimal pour” paintings and of TRA’s spaces.
We did not merely place art but called in the artist to design the space: his paintings are routinely exhibited as in a true artist’s loft, turning the art into the “view” of the mostly interior spaces.