Inside AD100 Designer Andre Mellone’s Elegant Manhattan Home

The fruits of that analog approach reveal themselves fully at his two-story penthouse, set in a Shigeru Ban–designed building, where garage-style window walls pivot and rise to dramatically merge indoors and out. Rigorous yet emotive, the home offers an eloquent study in geometry, with dynamic angles, simple shapes, and the occasional curve.

“I read everything as circles, squares, triangles,” notes Mellone, who cut his historicist teeth at Robert A.M. Stern Architects, Mark Hampton, Ferguson & Shamamian, and Sawyer|Berson before launching his own studio. All around us, elegant lines form a common thread, the furnishings’ strong silhouettes having seemingly been drawn in space—as if by Harold with a purple crayon, or rather Andre with a Prismacolor pen.

Mellone came across the apartment three years ago, in the midst of the pandemic and the aftermath of an amicable breakup. Spanning four bedrooms, four bathrooms, and five terraces, the listing was much more than any one person needed. But he envisioned it not simply as a place for himself but as a pied-à-terre for his extended family, including his mother, his sister and brother-and-law, and their three children. “It’s my home but a home I share constantly,” notes Mellone, adding that the project also represented a chance to explore new ideas free from the constraints of client expectations. “Designing for yourself, you are completely unafraid.”

It took courage to tackle the main room, a very long but relatively skinny volume, with 19-foot ceilings and those pivoting window walls at either end. “I understood right away that what’s most dramatic and most beautiful about the space is also most difficult,” says Mellone, who broke it down into a sequence of intimate seating areas, terminated by the dining area and a bespoke L-shaped sectional. To create an additional anchor between those two vignettes, he chose, of all things, a bed, albeit not just any bed: a 1926 Pierre Chareau beauty clad in amboyna wood. “No one in my family knew what to do with it,” Mellone notes of the heirloom, which had lingered in his sister and brother-in-law’s collection on account of its quirky proportions. Mellone fitted it with a custom mattress (partially upholstered in black leather to encourage people to kick up their feet) and installed rift-red-oak wainscoting along the wall behind it to engage the burl. Come party time, people now pile onto the piece, creating back-to-back conversation areas with adjacent perches.

Key references include the 1986 film 9½ Weeks, whose sets long ago sparked Mellone’s fascination with Manhattan. “This room reminds me of Mickey Rourke’s apartment,” notes the designer, who refinished his white oak floors in the same deep ebony as that iconic loft. (His 1982 Richard Meier dining set is another direct nod.) A trip to Marfa, Texas,
also served as a creative catalyst. Transfixed by the work of Donald Judd, Mellone translated the artist’s signature geometries into his own framework of form and repetition. The living area’s graphic custom carpet takes inspiration from an early painting, the bench from “stack” sculptures, and the irregularly tufted throw pillows from Judd’s nuanced colors and variations. On the main terrace, meanwhile, aluminum planters pay tribute to the 100 untitled works at the Chinati Foundation. Mellone’s homages line up perfectly with the building’s external columns, part of a subtle internal logic that reveals itself gradually.

And the apartment is certainly a blissful place to while away the hours, whether with friends—the window walls open, fresh air floating through the rooms—or alone at night decompressing. “It’s a totally different place depending on the time of day,” says Mellone. “Everything changes with the light.” He still draws, of course, only now at the drafting table in his bedroom, with views of the Chelsea skyline and the Hudson River. For Mellone, it’s all a Big Apple dream come true. “I’ve chosen New York as my home, and that wasn’t an easy decision,” he reflects. “But I’ve always loved what the city represented—industry, excitement, enterprise. I wouldn’t be here if every year it wasn’t getting better.”

Andre Mellone’s Manhattan home appears in AD’s Style issue. Never miss an issue when you subscribe to AD.