When an interior designer and a furniture dealer, who are also life partners, join forces to create a space, it is no wonder the end result is outstanding. In this floor-through apartment located in an old Tribeca building, in New York City, (who is at the helm of his eponymous studio) and Sean Robins (who is a principal in Studio Van den Akker and rents this place) faced a big challenge: the lack of natural light.
“While it is a great open space, it has limited light with windows only at the front and the back,” Lawson says. But sometimes constraints are the starting point for great ideas.
At night, the collection of modernist furniture and art – that the couple put together over the past decade – come to life in a whole different way thanks to the smart lighting system Hue from Philips (chosen by Robins), which allows the brightness and colour of every single light bulb in the apartment to be controlled separately from an iPhone.
“Sean is a tech fiend so I never know what’s coming next,” Lawson confesses. “The temperature of all the lights can be made warm and cozy in the way of incandescent light, no matter the type of fixture. The fun part is that they also can be made – each bulb separately – any colour in the light spectrum and set in all sorts of ‘moods’.”
Making the selection of objects, pieces of furniture and artworks, which would stand out during the day and also at night, was not an easy task for Lawson and Robins.
“Both of us working in the design world, there is a lot of visual information that we take in every day – historical references, interiors, art galleries, books, auctions,” says Lawson. “All day long, we see things. So, really, our biggest job is to edit ourselves.”
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Paintings by Fritz Scholder, Michael Boyd, Ryan Sullivan and Matthew Kelberg; a photo of the Brussels cathedral by Markus Brunetti; two coffee tables by Ado Chale; a black and clear glass cabinet by Maurice Pre; lamps by Lisa Johansson Pape and Luigi Caccia Dominioni; and the Flag Halyard chair by Hans Wegner are some of the treasures to discover in the different areas. Lawson, however, has two favourites: “the Zig Zag stool cast aluminium commissioned by me for Sean’s and my 10th anniversary from Desert Cast, a Kuwaiti design collective” and the big vintage pendants from the 1960s by Pierre Szekely over the dining table, which “make a huge impact”, according to Lawson. “And they’re very fun to have dinner underneath.”
The rich saturated colours perfectly fit Robins’s taste and lean into the moody vibe of the space. “I hope the apartment looks tight and edited, but still personal and really shows that all of the things truly were collected over time,” Lawson says.
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