First, a little history: The concrete building originally was designed as a telephone switching station in the mid-1940s. When an architectural team purchased it for rehab in the `70s, it became one of the first loft condos in the city.
Typical floor plans included Colorado-like fireplace seating pits, brown shag carpeting and bronze mini-blinds. But that wouldn`t do for interior designer Shelley Handman of Handman Associates Inc. For his unit, he looked beyond those somewhat limiting features to 11-foot ceilings, wood floors, exterior walls of solid glass with a west exposure and, perhaps most appealing of all, 1,800 square feet, almost triple his former space in a studio apartment.
The biggest design problem was the loft`s proximity to a busy thoroughfare and a view of blocks of ”uncontrollable, nondimmable street lights.” Handman solved it by introducing a sheer, gauzy drapery that adds a veil to the exterior view, screening light while softening the open space.
A designer friend, Terri Weinstein, suggested he layer the drapery casements to create a moire-like quality and another level of interest. ”That set the mood,” Handman says, ”giving me something exotic. It transformed the vastness into something very enveloping.”
The ”something exotic” was echoed in an unusual pair of sofas with gilded frames depicting Egyptian symbols. Handman found them in a Miami antique shop; they once had graced the lobby of an elegant hotel there in the `30s. He changed the upholstery from red crushed velvet to a white cotton duck.
To ”calm down” the gilding, Handman added a large glass-topped cocktail table with a limestone base. ”I like the crude quality of the stone and the lack of sheen,” he says. On the table is a collection of antique Egyptian, Greek and Israeli glass that he displays in Plexiglas boxes. To this mix he added a steel-and-rubber chair designed by Rene Herbst in the `30s and two spectacular overscale lounge chairs that sit low to the ground and are upholstered in tapestry, an elegant touch.
In the dining area Handman chose a modern mix of furnishings. The long, glass-topped table is supported by a wooden I-beam and steel legs. Half of the chairs are upholstered in yellow, half in white, the result, Handman says, of being ”impetuous” (the chairs happened to be in stock, and he didn`t want to wait).
”I meant to change the chairs all along (to match), but once they were in the space, I liked the relaxed, less studied feeling they gave it.”
A bonus to the open space is a room that functions as home office/extra bedroom/TV room. It shares a fireplace with the living room, which makes it an extra-cozy niche.
”The juxtaposition of furnishings-antiques, thrift-store finds, contemporary-is interesting,” says Alan Boyd, a design associate who shares the space. ”Editing is the key to the design. There`s color, but not an excessiveness.
”The design of a space should allow evolution,” Boyd says. ”Here there`s an opportunity to periodically change things without having to redecorate.”
