Filed under: Design, etc, House Tours, Architecture
Photo: Nykia Spradley
Everything's coming up roses at the designer's 6,000-square-foot home.
Fashion designer Lela Rose and her husband Brandon Jones have a thing for ground-floor apartments, so when the opportunity arose to buy a former fabric warehouse space in New York City's Tribeca neighborhood, they took it.
And so began a six year transformation of the space, from a raw, empty room (with two floors below street level) to the stunning and thoroughly clever space Rose envisioned. She showed me around, while prepping for dinner guests, a passion of hers and the inspiration behind the home's design.
Living Room Storefront
One of Rose's favorite first-floor features is the iron, three-step stoop that leads up to the apartment's main entrance. My favorite thing about it: the front-row view it provides of her living room (above). "People think it's a store," Rose says. We think it looks more like an art gallery.
The all-white front room is a microcosm of the rest of the apartment, featuring a modern mix of items -- a circular banquette by Pierre Paulin, a wall of photographs Rose has collected over the years and a pair of Louis XIV sidechairs she had reupholstered (below). Plus, there's a view onto the subsequent rooms, including the floor-to-ceiling bamboo dining area followed by a more traditional dining room off of the open kitchen and a fourth space that is completely covered in felt. (The felt room also houses a DJ booth, which doubles as a cozy nook for the family's dog, Stitch, or any party guest looking for a hideout, who can access the space from a private elevator shaped like a Monopoly house.)
A circular banquette in the living room is designed by Pierre Paulin. Photo: Nykia Spradley
Rose created an art gallery wall of out of framed photographs that she collected over the years. Photo: Nykia Spradley
Rose had these Louis XIV sidechairs reupholstered with fabric inspired by one of her fashion designs. Photo: Nykia Spradley
Lela the Entertainer
The heart and soul of the apartment is a series of wooden tables that rise up out of the floor (and a glass one that lowers from the ceiling) linking the kitchen, dining, and living areas and seating a small army of guests for dinner (shown below). "I love to entertain and I love to do these moving parties somehow," Rose says, explaining how she once hosted a cocktail party in a nearby subway station. "So we decided -- as crazy as this sounds -- that we wanted tables that moved around so we didn't have to move furniture."
In Rose's home, the tables come up out of the floor. Photo: Nykia Spradley
Once dinner is had (or fashions seen) guests can retreat to the downstairs wine cellar/tequila tasting room, which features a vintage scrabble board in the center (below).
Photo: Nykia Spradley
Design on a Dime
After such an extensive (and pricey) overhaul, Rose had to get resourceful when it came to decorating. "I hate to waste things," Rose says. "I love new contemporary furniture, but I didn't want to go buy all new things."
For the front room she adopted a pair of Louis XIV sidechairs from her mom and had them embroidered in a pattern inspired by one of her clothing pieces. For the kids' rooms, leftover fabrics became window treatments, quilts, headboard upholstery and a canopy for her daughter Rosey's bed (below). Rose also repurposed an old dining table, cutting it down to coffee table height and splitting it in two. One half lives in the felt room, the other half in the front of the apartment.
Photo: Nykia Spradley
From Fashion to Furniture
"For me everything is about fabric; I love to decorate in fabric," Rose says. "So you'll see that in a lot of areas of the house. It's just very textural and I share that sensibility with both home and with work." Rose's massive walk-in closet is big on texture and fabric, and colorful enough to make even Carrie Bradshaw squeal (below).
Ooh, what we wouldn't do to trade closets with Ms. Rose! Photo: Nykia Spradley
The apartment's linear, patchwork-like design was inspired by a table Rose admired at a local shop called BDDW. "They had done this amazing table," she explains. "They kept adding a twelve inch section to it and each section was done in a completely different material, a completely different type of workmanship, but when it was altogether it flowed as one beautiful gorgeous piece."
That table became Rose's blueprint for the space and that's exactly what the home turned out to be -- an incredibly well thought out space with a series of rooms that are all their own.
Says Rose: "It takes vision to look at a space like this and think what you could do with it. But looking back I feel like we really achieved what we thought we were going to be doing."
A photo of Lela Rose, her husband and daughter. Photo: Getty Images