3 Interior Designers Transform The Same Soho Loft

[Narrator] These three interior designers

have been given a photograph of an empty studio loft.

They have free reign to design it in any way they please.

Hi, I'm Noz Nozawa and I absolutely love color

and texture and layering patterns and all of the above.

Hi, my name's Darren Jett,

I'm an interior designer based in New York City,

and I am giving you your fantasy.

My name is Joy Moyler,

I'm an interior designer based in New York,

and my style is classic, relaxed, and approachable.

[Narrator] No clients, no restrictions, just blank space.

[Darren] I see a loft here.

I'm very excited about this project,

I can already see that if this was on the market,

and if I was looking and I had the money, I would buy it.

[Noz] What I'm seeing is a very iconic, sort of like

downtown New York apartment.

But I also see by way of the layout,

it's kind of a strange space.

It's very, very long,

which is not uncommon when it comes to city apartments,

but all the light, naturally, comes from one side.

I Love the tin ceiling, It's expected.

It's an element that I would never ever eradicate

in a loft space, because it is truly New York.

I could totally see a curry yellow, like a really rich,

maybe almost a green undertone mustard on the walls.

One thing that I also want to probably address

is figure out what's happening here.

I don't really love this kind of thing

that's interrupting the flow

with these beautiful windows that look out onto

probably a really cool streetscape in Soho.

It looks to be perhaps a walk-in closet.

I would move that walk-in closet probably into the bedroom

and have a very cool space over there.

I would love to open this up

and create a really cool entertaining zone.

If you have three windows,

how amazing would it be if we could make six.

So think about if we could actually

mirror this wall right here.

Maybe it's like a tinted mirror like this.

So when I look at these windows,

of course they're beautiful, but also like

there's already not that much light coming through,

let's be honest.

Thinking of someone who loves Morocco, loves Marrakesh,

and is inspired by traditional Moroccan riad homes.

And so I'm loving the idea of doing window treatments

where we do a fabric covered cornice

over each of the windows

in a traditional Moroccan horseshoe art shape.

So what a cornice is, sometimes people call them valances,

some people pronounce them valances.

What they technically are are a wood frame

that goes over the top of the window,

or over the top and down the sides of a window

to hide other curtains or to hide yucky window frame things.

My approach is to maintain the tin ceiling,

maintain that brick wall,

I would never get rid of a brick wall.

And just kind of work from there.

I wanna create separate zones for seating and relaxing,

but if I built walls,

you would feel as though you were in a jail,

I don't care what anybody says.

This light wall here is the only source of light

for the entire loft.

So in order to create separation of spaces,

you need something that's lacy,

and also something that does not go to the ceiling.

And so the placement of these screens answers that solution.

I would love to perhaps do some vertical blinds,

how cool would that be?

To really give some verticality in this kind of long space,

but to also give that nod to the seventies

and nod to some really cool designers

such as Joe D'Urso or Bray Schaible.

As I think about the floors, to be honest with you,

even though every texture in this apartment

is kind of amazing on its own,

there's a part of me that feels like this floor

is not in good shape.

So why don't we recover them?

Again, inspired by sort of Moroccan tradition,

I wanna do a tile mosaic on the floor,

I'm really excited about that.

Zellige is one of my favorite, favorite mosaic materials,

it's all hand cut by artisans in Morocco.

And we could do like a teal and indigo fantasia

of amazing tile on the floor

and that could be one of the places

where we do color and pattern, but it's built in.

As opposed to what's more expected of doing

tons and tons of patterning on the upholstery.

The overall vibe of this space should be

one that is a bit understated and a bit muted,

and I think that in order to not create a space

that feels super high contrast,

we could do a carpet underfoot that really,

it's not white and it's not beige,

but it has that sort of hint of neutrality to it.

So I like this carpet here,

it's actually more of like an almond color.

I have so many clients who ask me for a seating pit.

So many people who are interested in

this kind of sunken living room.

From a sort of atmospheric perspective,

I also love the idea of creating a bit of drama.

A chaise longue, it makes you relax,

it forces you to be quiet,

it forces you to just have a moment

where you maybe turn the music to some real cool Nina Simone

and you're just kind of grooving and vibing.

The couch is a sustainable vegan leather,

so no cows were harmed in the making of it.

The little black side table,

again, is a wiry little table, it's functional,

you can turn and you can set your drink down,

but it's also lacy again,

and light is able to transmit through it.

For this space, I really wanna play with built-in seating.

I have long been obsessed with built-in seating

of all different forms.

In Moroccan traditional home sedari,

which is like built-in, wraparound, wall to wall seating,

I love that so much, it just feels so relaxed,

there's something so incredibly inviting.

I love the idea of having the couch

start in this corner down here, and it's very big, right?

There are different chunks where

it almost acts like a built in chaise,

where you can put your feet all the way out,

people can lounge, you could actually have nap spots,

have that wrap all the way around,

create some organic shapes

by having things bulge out into the space.

If we're going ahead and building out this plinth

and we have the seating,

and look, we have a ton of space that's almost 20 feet,

it would be fantastic to take

maybe 20 inches or so behind that

and create a built-in planter

that runs along the brick wall.

If we have the seating in front of that,

and you know, again,

maybe the seating is a sort of mohair

that picks up on the color of the carpet underfoot.

If we have that in front of the banquette

there's nothing that's more sexy

than being within a sort of jungle,

and you have the plants that extend over your head.

The dining room table,

I'm thinking we would do a custom execution

to go along with the custom built-ins,

is translucent depending on where the light is coming from.

That's the fun thing about like mirrored glass

is you can actually light it from underneath too.

But we would do like a smokey brown glass top,

that way it plays off of the reflectivity that,

the dining table is way back in the apartment.

I want there to be more shiny reflective surfaces

to be able to bounce light from the windows

which are so far away, into the rear of the apartment.

A lot of people will start with an area rug,

and that's a springboard for the textiles that are used.

So it's definitely functional,

it's functional the same way a tatami mat

is functional in Japan, where a room in Japan

is not judged by or measured by

the square footage, it's judged by the the tatami mat.

So an area rug essentially does the same thing,

it defines the space, it defines the square footage,

and it's functional and decorative as well.

I'm looking at a bunch of different fabrics that I love,

everything is very texturally rich

and somewhere between neutral or an earth driven color.

What's really standing out to me is this dedar fabric.

This one is so extraordinary,

it's called Oz and I love it,

there's like glitter elements in between,

and it actually, in real life, is like big stripes,

you can kind of see here.

In a space like this where we can play with the scale

and we can play with the levels,

it would be interesting to explore sinking the dining area

in that plinth that we're actually building up.

So we're actually doing something with that plinth

instead of it just existing for the sake of existing.

Maybe we introduce new materiality,

maybe we do a sort of black leather,

in a tufted pattern to provide a bit of texture

and something sort of different and a bit of a contrast

that would sink into that carpet on one side.

The sideboard sort of melds into the wall,

and it becomes just this little sculptural element,

and doesn't take up too much space.

The sideboard is truly functional

to house books, and games for game night,

and other things that you don't want visible in the space.

And then when it comes to the tables,

I love a low coffee table, especially when it comes to

figuring out how do you define and delineate

the living area part of the built-in

from the dining table part.

So in the living space,

I'm thinking of using Kelly Wearstler's tables,

partly because they're very practical

and they're made in a mix of travertine, stone, and wood,

so having that mix of materials

feels really natural and a little more casual.

And different sizes, so some are larger, some are littler.

Those arm chairs are for comfort,

I love a dark rich arm chair

that's soft and approachable.

Every piece of upholstery I think

needs to have toss pillows,

so if you fall asleep, you could bunch up,

when you're reading.

It picks up the elements and the tonality

that's in the area rug

and ties these spaces together handsomely

Definitely wanna get rid of all the light fixtures here

we can do something cooler.

I tell my clients all the time that I'm a lighting freak.

You will have so many lamps when you deal with me,

you will have so many sources of light,

and they're all gonna be on different switches,

and everything's on a dimmer.

In this space, beyond having the lights above,

I would also have lights in the planters,

I would have lights behind the sofa, along the window wall.

I'm going to add some blackout shades

along these windows for movie night,

because even if you wanna watch a movie during the day,

loft lighting is really imposing.

One of the things that I'm obsessed with

is Trueing Studio's lights,

I have always aspired to use their glass links,

they're so incredibly beautiful.

And again, because they're shiny,

but they're also translucent,

it's a way of doing a lot of decorative light

in a space this vast, and this dark frankly,

without really competing for attention

with the natural light.

I'm thinking of having some three dimensional art

placed along this wall,

perhaps in a cluster just to add a center of interest.

And I think over here at the sideboard,

simply placing some framed art

that's fanciful and colorful and fun.

So I think one thing that I'm always

trying to get clients to get on board with

is the idea of mixing antiquity with modernity.

We're clearly creating a space that is

leaning heavily in the sort of seventies direction.

And in order for it to not feel like a pastiche

or to feel like a copy of a book that you've seen before,

you have to interject it with the sort of opposite,

and everything has to feel very organic,

but there's a lot of thought behind it.

What I would like to do here is to do something

that brings in that idea of antiquity,

perhaps we do a plaster sculpture

that is over the dining area,

maybe it's some kind of Greek plaster

or marble, I don't know.

On the wall, I absolutely love this piece.

It is one of Wendy Chen's circuit boards.

She is an incredible artist

who plays with the idea of lines and the direction of line,

and the medium in this particular case is rope, and knots.

She's based in San Francisco, she's so brilliant,

I love her, I just love her brain.

The other thing I really love about Wendy's art,

especially in this space, is that it's textural,

so there's a big piece of wood

that holds the circuit boards together in a line,

and then all of that richness that you see visually

is actually made from very touchable rope.

[Darren] Maybe we do something that's much more

of like an alter piece, something that's wooden,

something that's definitely been around for a long time.

I think that would be a very cool juxtaposition,

providing a bit of tension between the modernity

and something that is much more historical,

and also has a bit of a narrative to it.

I imagine the person who is occupying the space

is going to be someone who loves art,

they love entertaining, they love going out

and maybe bringing their friends home for a nightcap,

and they have a real penchant for architecture

and historical elements

such as tin ceilings and brick walls

and they appreciate those things,

and they never in a million years

think of tearing them down.

I would call this final look

relaxing, structured and enjoyable.

[Darren] I think for me the space is very cool

because it feels like a space that I could easily inhabit.

The level of modernity, the level of sophistication,

the level of being casual,

and also the tension between elements.

You have the irreverence of a disco mirror table,

but it has a tension with a plaster

from, you know, God knows when behind it.

I love the idea that a space like this

is just sort of like so multi-sensory, and so enveloping

that a creative person can come in

and be both indulged by, and inspired by, and activated by

all of the ways that their senses wake up

in a space like this.

I'm obsessed with this final design,

admittedly, I would move into this,

I would probably take the corner seat every single day,

so I'm thrilled.

Whoa.

Oh my gosh. Whoa, Nelly.

Goodness.

Wowza, I think I need to start smoking something.

My stuff is so conservative. No way.

I need to start smoking.

Wait, but we have like some similar vibes actually

across all of ours. Yeah.

I love that we both ended up in built-in seating,

but I was inspired just by like riads,

I've never been to Morocco,

it's like very high on my list of places,

so that was kind of the inspiration

And I love this, I love that art on the wall.

Oh, thank you.

Is that woven leather, tell us about that.

So this is Wendy Chen,

she's a San Francisco artist who I absolutely love,

and this is one of her circuit board pieces.

So she does a ton of different knots,

and basically the whole concept here

is inspired by Silicon Valley's circuit board.

You just went very like West Coast on me right now.

Can you tell she's part of Silicon Valley.

But I have to say I love the,

it's giving very Marrakesh, which I think is very cool.

You took like the kind of artist vibe,

and I'm getting a little bit of seventies,

like Yves Saint Laurent, like he's hanging out in here

with like his cool friends.

And I was thinking that's very Joe D'Urso.

[Darren] Oh hell yeah.

That was definitely on the mood board.

You're reading my mind over here, I love it.

We should definitely hang out.

I go to sleep way before you do.

I just love the seating and the ceiling more than anything.

For me, if everything else were removed,

I just think the lines of the horizontal banding

of the seating elements and the ceiling

in and of itself those two elements I think are so strong,

you can almost insert anything into that.

For example, you could switch out that flooring

with narcis floor and you still captivated by the ceiling

and that

pattern still pops.

The lights are really fun too,

it's like, how do we keep the idea of a loft?

And it's like, you have the brick walls,

you have the tin ceilings,

I didn't wanna eliminate that

because it felt intrinsic to the nature of a Soho...

[Noz] Actually none of us did, we left all of that.

[Joy] I sort of kept those things.

[Darren] Yeah, I think they're very cool.

Because I think it's important to

maintain that heritage of the space.

[Darren] Definitely. Absolutely.

What are those on the wall adjacent?

These are three dimensional flowers

that are 15 inches in diameter.

You can look at these plants, these flowers on the wall,

but imagine being in the garden and hearing

hummingbirds and that sort of thing,

to quiet all the New York sounds going on

outside of those windows.

I think I'm gonna go back to the Joe D'Urso days.

And I would steal this planter,

just to have all of that natural life behind the built-ins.

I'm just like, oh, all I have to do is

just cheat this forward, like 18 inches.

And then what is this, are these slats?

Oh, those are vertical blinds.

Oh, amazing.

So just pushing it in that direction.

[Noz] I love a vertical blind.

And I love the fireplace there as well,

that it isn't a full height obstruction,

that light passes through it again.

And then to that point,

what I would definitely steal are these screens,

I think they would work wonderfully in this space.

I love them so much.

They're really giving that vibe,

which is actually very similar to the vibe

[Joy] that you're creating. Marrakesh.

And I also, I love the shape of the windows,

I think they're so sick.

And also, is this the didar?

Yeah, it is, the Oz yeah.

I love the didar Oz, I love them so much.

And I think this colorway is really, really cool,

and I just love that stripe,

and how it starts to sort of ombre out on the edges.

[Noz] With like glitter.

Yeah, glitter.

I like glitter threads.

Why not? Yeah.