Design Well Within Reach

“We are design junkies, it is our passion,” said Anne, gesturing around the airy main room of the duplex she shares on 13th Street with her husband Mike and son Max.

The light streams into the open kitchen/dining/living room vrom a skylight and four oversized windows and onto the brightly-hued, eclectic mix of mid-century modern collectibles.

“A lot of Park Slope buildings tend to be narrow and dark, but what attracted us most about the place was how airy and light-filled it felt,” Anne said of the two-bedroom, two-bath apartment whose two floors are connected by an open spiral staircase.That and the possibility of building a roof deck overhead sold the couple six years ago on the co-op in the six-unit four-story brick building between Seventh and Eight avenues.

The open plan offered a perfect canvas for the many vintage pieces the couple has happened upon online, on the street and, mostly, on sale.

A Saarinen Knoll office chair worth roughly $900 that sits at a desk in Max’s room, for example, was picked up for $100 during a friend’s office moving sale.

“There are a lot of stories like that,” Anne said with a smile. Vintage finds like the church pew in the downstairs entry and the modern Danish credenza and grey couch in the living room – all purchased together for a modest $1,100 at another moving sale though they’re worth much more – “offer us some redemption for being such design freaks,” she said. “It can be an expensive hobby.”

The keen eye for great design at bargain prices first began when Mike, an executive for a film equipment rental company, spotted a bureau in the hallway of the couple’s first apartment building in Chelsea. “It was coated in black paint, but Mike liked the lines and the overall shape of the piece,” Anne remembers. Stripped to its natural wood, they realized the bureau, now in their bedroom, was actually a 1950s Heywood-Wakefield.

“It was our first ‘nice’ piece of furniture, and it made us want more,” Anne said. Since then, the two have sought out pieces from Heywood-Wakefield and have found a desk for Max, two chairs, a side table and a bed that has since been given away.

The high designer pieces mix well with unnamed items to produce a cohesive but comfortable feel. School chairs found on the street flank a red rectangular dining table recently found at Conran that was originally designed in 1956 by Lucian Ercolani. On the walls, a Chagall lithograph mixes with a Murikami lithograph and posters from street artist Shepard Fairey, and a variety of photographs from famed photographers like Joyce Tennison as well as up-and-comers like Brett Messenger whose blurred forest landscape mimicking the trees just outside their windows they discovered in local Café Grumpy on Seventh Avenue.

Anne, a staff producer for a TV commercial production company, attributes her appreciation of modern design to the “very unique, modern, quirky” home her parents built in the suburbs of Paris in the 70s with the help of an architect.

“It was very unusual for St-Cloud — an old French conservative neighborhood — and people freaked out,” she said.

The kilim rug hanging over the wall in the spiral staircase and the cow-skin rug under the dining table come from that house, but the rest of the furnishings are things Mike and Anne have found themselves.

“We’re always on the hunt for interesting vintage pieces from the 40s and beyond,” Anne said.

Even others think of the couple when out and about. “Recently, someone called us to say they had seen four Knoll chairs at the Salvation Army for $35 a piece,” Anne said, laughingly. Though she briefly lamented that the friend didn’t pick them up, she realized, like with a recent green-and-white 70s dresser they found and passed on, the chairs might not have bumped existing loved items.

“We tend to risk major clutter, and right now it’s a problem because we don’t want to replace anything,” she said, sadly. Luckily, there are always shoes. Anne showed off her collection of Swedish Has-Beens under a bench in her bedroom, two of which were picked up by an office-mate who lined up during the recent one-day sale of the designer’s footwear at H&M. She had paid a bit more for the two she had found herself online.

The couple did nothing more than paint and buff the floors when they moved in, shortly afterward turning the upstairs bathroom from a half bath into a full bath with the addition of a red penny-tiled shower. The industrial rubber floor put into that bathroom (an idea stolen from Anne’s parents’ house) was used as well in the redesign of the small but efficient kitchen last year. There, the high/low style of the couple comes out in the choice of a pricey Caesar Stone countertop and a stylish red glass tile backsplash paired with a basic stainless oven hood and sink from Home Depot and cabinets from Ikea.

The deck, reachable one flight up from the fourth-floor living space through the hallway stairs outside the apartment, is a design-buff’s dream, showcasing all of the modern architecture of Manhattan. The couple relaxes from their relentless style-searching on the platform they made it their mission to build with the pooled resources of their co-cooperators two years after they moved in.

The views are in keeping with those in their apartment below: always something fabulous on which to train the eye.

Editor's Note: Stephanie Thompson is our new Neighborhood Nests columnist. Her own was actually featured in our last Neightborhood Nests.