When a 24-year-old budding art collector began conceptualising her new Soho loft, she wanted a home that would suit her current phase of life, but also evolve with her over time. Given the client’s age, it could have been easy for a designer to lean too juvenile — too loud, too playful. Yes, the young woman wanted a place where she could host parties, but she also wanted it to feel both fun and like a refuge — a place where she could just as easily curl up and read as she could host a dinner for 12. An apartment she could grow into.
New York-based designer Lauren Garrett, who recently moved back after over a decade in Los Angeles, knew that she needed to create a home that her client, a California native looking to plant roots in the city, would love now and in the years to come. ‘She wanted something that she wasn’t going to get sick of really quickly,’ Lauren says.
With her studio LP Creative, Lauren’s goal was to design a home that was both liveable and beautiful. She leaned into the existing look of the Soho loft, the kind of space where twentysomethings would live in a TV show. (The Friends, if they were chic.) The elevator opens up directly into the unit, where there’s plenty of exposed brick, tall arched windows, and an open, airy great room. ‘It’s a very classic loft,’ she notes. ‘We wanted to highlight that and not mask it in any way.’
She gave the apartment a ‘minor facelift,’ nips and tucks like plastering the walls (with the help of Kamp Studios) and changing light fixtures. But the bulk of the work came afterwards. The loft has two bedrooms and a study, with much of the square footage taken up by the great room, a combination of the home’s living, dining and kitchen space. Lauren wanted the areas to feel distinct yet linked.
For the living space, the client’s main directive was ‘cosy’. ‘Give me the huge comfy couch. I want to have cuddle puddles on the floor,’ Lauren recalls her saying. The designer began from the ground up, purchasing a Woven crimson mohair rug that she says is ‘like a cloud to lay down on’. That ‘huge, comfy couch,’ an oversized L-shape sectional, ended up coming from Lauren’s own gallery, Galier Was. It’s a popular piece for them, one that she describes as both architectural yet lived-in. There’s a sturdy frame, but the floppy pillows are strewn about — definitely not propped up and ‘chopped,’ she says.
In reach of the living area is the dining table, perhaps the hardest-working item in the loft. The client wanted to be able to seat 10 to 12 people, but it didn’t make sense to have such a large piece become a constant presence in the space. Lauren created a custom table — or, rather, two tables — that would adapt to her client’s mood. Most of the time, one table is used as a small kitchen nook four-seater while the other holds court as a dining table. When hosting duties call for a larger group, the two tables fit together like matching puzzle pieces. The end result is ‘by far one of the most creative things we’ve ever designed,’ she says.
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The client’s more private spaces — the main bedroom, guest bed and study — presented an opportunity for Lauren to take more risks. ‘We wanted to make sure that the other rooms also had their own real identity and felt connected, but special and different,’ she says. ‘So that’s where we started to really play with paint colours.’
While the spaces still come across fairly neutral, the main bedroom offers a surprise in its bright blue ceiling, drawing the eye up to the loft’s classic beams. The guest bedroom, meanwhile, is awash in a pale chartreuse-meets-pistachio. The colour, Lauren says, ‘has got this really lovely, warm, calming feeling to it’.
In all of these spaces, Lauren mixed custom pieces and antiques with new finds from young artists and staples from her favourite makers. The main bedroom hosts a Danny Kaplan Studio bed, detailed with the artist’s ceramic tiles, next to Studio Valle de Valle nightstands and 1960s Swedish table lamps sourced from 1stDibs, all under a pendant light from Courtney Applebaum Design. ‘This project in general is so telling of the type of designer that I am,’ she says. ‘It’s really how I want people to view my work.’
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But, she notes, the most important part of this project was her relationship with the young collector now living in the space — the person who believed in the puzzle table and the ‘neutral’ chartreuse walls.
‘The synergy was there when we were designing and there was so much trust. For me, that’s the number one thing in a project,’ Lauren says. “And we really had that here.’ lpcreative.com
