A watercolor by Adam Lister—a colorful cubist rendition of Diego Velázquez’s intriguing 1656 painting Las Meninas—hangs in the entryway of this Manhattan apartment. If you look closely you can vaguely make out the characters of the famous Spanish court scene, rendered by Lister in colorful squares: The five-year-old Infanta Margaret Theresa at center, the king and queen reflected in the mirror, the foot of young Nicolás Pertusato playfully provoking a large mastiff on the floor. Of course, if you just give it a glimpse, the artwork is blissfully abstract—a soothing mix of colors and shapes. “It’s sort of like an introduction to the house,” says Colin Stief, partner of General Assembly, who renovated the place with copartner Sarah Zames a few years ago, using this painting’s dusty-primary palette and sense of geometry as a creative springboard. It’s an apt analogy for the home: A prewar structure, refracted through a contemporary lens, ever mindful of the history that lies beneath the floorboards.
New York City apartment buildings, after all, are a bit like architectural patchwork quilts. The old ones at least. Structures are built, cut up, stitched back together, and added onto 100 years later in an entirely new material palette. All those layers of history add narrative and atmosphere, but after one too many remodels it can be easy to lose the plot. When Ian Ferguson and Ryan James Brandau—the CEO of tech start-up Pinata and music conductor, respectively—called on General Assembly to merge two neighboring apartments they owned in a circa 1910 Greenwich Village co-op (the structure is actually two buildings that were merged), maintaining that storyline was top of mind.
“When a space has been changed and changed and changed, you can lose a lot of what makes it special,” Stief explains. “A big part of this project for us was trying to hold on to, like, any of that that we could, and then also build on it a little bit.”
The couple was merging the one-bedroom apartment they had lived in since 2009 with the small studio next door they bought in 2011. All in all, it was just 1,200 square feet. The challenge was to create a string of discrete spaces that allowed them to have different experiences within the space but still hung together as an aesthetic whole. It was a gut renovation, but moldings, fireplaces, white oak floors all conjured a sense of history for the place.
Colors from the Lister painting, as well as Cornucopia with Drones, a painting on Tyvek by Nancy Friedmann, set the tone for the apartment where each room is wrapped in a particular hue, creating a color-block enfilade, maintaining the cubist inspiration. The desire was to create discrete areas—and vibes—within a relatively petite space. Farrow & Ball’s taupe-y Oxford Stone in the living room leads to a space slicked in Bancha, the color of green tea. The kitchen backsplash is painted in Farrow & Ball’s Deep Reddish Brown, while the library is in Benjamin Moore’s Evening Sky. The enveloping palette, which Ferguson calls “moody but muted” brings the L-shaped layout together, working from lightest to darkest as you move—or look—through the space. Whenever they were second-guessing themselves, they returned to that painting, which, Zames says, she prefers to referencing a historical interior or something on Pinterest. “We’d just ask, what would this image do?”