June 14, 2004

Fabulous

I’ve been crashing on Strunk and Rogan’s couch since the move. Their new apartment is a lovely, traditional New York-style converted loft. Needs a bit of work; the previous tenants, rather than attempting to achieve an unfinished look, simply left things unfinished. As in the bedroom walls are about 80 percent done, and rather half-assedly done at that. But finishing them off will still be a lot less work than putting up new walls, and aside from a few other small projects, mostly what their problem is space: There’s a hell of a lot of it, and it will take quite a bit of skill and planning to make comfortable and stylish. Like being too rich or too thin, having too much space in a New York apartment is a problem that evokes envy rather than sympathy. And the boys are really excited about planning and buying new stuff and doing all the little necessary things to bring it together. In fact, these past couple weeks I’ve spent listening to them have an voluble debate about their design preferences. Let me see if I can distill the essence of their respective visions into a single paragraph for you:

Rogan: Our byword will be stark. I want to clad the floor in textured aluminum. Walls: white. For the coffee table, there will be a single pane of smoked glass, suspended from the ceiling on transparent micro-filaments. All the furniture will be rolled stainless steel, burnished to such a brilliant sheen that anyone entering the apartment will have to wear sunglasses or else go blind.

Strunk: Hey, you know what would be neat? A couple of big brass-studded leather armchairs, a rocking chair, some heavy walnut furniture. We could get a roll-top desk, velvet-flocked wallpaper, mount a deer head on that wall. A gun rack would go with the theme, but that might be a little much.

I’m really interested to see the collision --- er, compromise they arrive at.

Posted by Diablevert at June 14, 2004 06:52 PM | TrackBack
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