West Village Apartment
Within the distinct Fitzroy building, this apartment in the West Chelsea neighborhood of New York City carries the imprint of a now century-old Art Deco style that continues to have relevance and appeal. Marking the second collaboration with these clients, the project has developed as an ongoing, living dialogue rather than as a one and done statement piece.
Shawn Henderson responded acutely to the building’s historically informed design, choosing to lean into its moody atmospheric weight rather than work against it. This sensitivity is most vividly expressed in the dining room, which is wrapped in hand-painted silk wallpaper. The overall design balances this density with a lighter, restrained palette of soft whites, greys, and pale woods—notably French oak trim—providing a neutral, quiet backdrop for modernist paintings and sculpture. Other materials were carefully selected for their textural vitality: raw linen, honed marble, and brushed nickel. By embracing a darker, richer hue in key areas, the apartment becomes a deliberate counterpoint to the vast expanse of sky outside.
Practicality remains paramount but it doesn’t have to overpower everything else. Invisible storage solutions include custom wall-to-wall millwork that also conceals appliances. The kitchen, configured for professional-grade performance, keeps the main living area pristine, while efficient Casa Kids bunk beds in the secondary bedroom demonstrate Henderson’s flexibility in responding to the client's evolving needs. By balancing the building's industrial context with custom upholstery and vintage Danish chairs, he harnessed the power of texture as a unifying quality. The result is a space that’s site-sensitive, comfortable, and forever in flux, capturing the silvery light of the nearby Hudson River in a permanent, anchored form.
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Project Notes
West Village Apartment
Project Notes
For all its promise of generous, wide-open space, the idea of loft living—or loftlike living—has its drawbacks. When my clients acquired a Manhattan apartment in a Herzog & de Meuron–designed building on the Hudson River, I was challenged to reimagine the home’s voluminous social area. Having worked with these clients before, I knew the way they lived, and I wanted to carve out a series of discrete spaces without compromising the airiness, light, and views. To this end, I designed a continuous ribbon of whitewashed
cypress that delineates rooms and obscures service elements, an elegant and highly functional solution.
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That project began at the front door, where I created a new entry hall that establishes a sense of arrival and decompression before one moves into the main living area, where the glorious river views unfold. Clad in the pale cypress, the minimalist entry opens into the apartment through a graceful archway that nods to the building’s rounded forms. Evening visitors are greeted with a kaleidoscope of colors ricocheting across the ceiling and walls, courtesy of The Tetrahedral Night, a light sculpture by Olafur Eliasson. The piece crowns an intimate setting of vintage Milo Baughman chairs clustered around a circular cocktail table. The cypress wall continues into the living room proper, which includes a seating area defined by grooved millwork around the fireplace, bathed in serene neutrals, with occasional wine-red accents to enliven the mix. The textural variety of the fabrics and other materials adds a richness and warmth to the crisp modern architecture.
Muted, quiet tones extend into the primary bedroom, but in the children’s rooms, the palette adds bright blues and greens.
One of the most crucial aspects of the assignment was establishing a separation between the living and dining areas, which I accomplished with a freestanding, semicircular divider in the same cypress that doubles as a small buffet. Like my other architectural interventions, the divider helps create different experiences from one space to the next. A panel concealed in the wall just to the right of the fireplace swings to meet the divider, enclosing the dining room. It was a true feat of engineering to make these architectural interventions connected and cohesive. Throughout the home, one of my more contemporary spaces, artworks by Georg Baselitz, Tal R, Robert Longo, Leon Polk Smith, Leelee Kimmel, and others contribute to the ambience of calm, collected cool.
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