The black apartment: a noir New York loft interior
There’s a touch of the downtown superclub of yesteryear about advertising guru Cindy Gallop’s New York loft interior. It’s not just the fact that she’s set up home in what was once the locker room of the Chelsea YMCA, or that the space has been turned into a vast, open plan apartment that Cindy can ride her Gucci bicycle around. No, there’s something about the gloss-black walls and ceiling and matt black carpet, offsetting wild installations of neon, mismatched framed oil paintings and stuffed animals that brings to mind the hey day of arty soireés and hard to penetrate velvet ropes. It’s a total fantasy – conceived by New York creative agency The Apartment – of what a Manhattan apartment should be; Slaves of New York redux.
Photography by Mark C.O’Flaherty
"Many people fail to realise that the entire apartment is painted black until I tell them", says Gallop. The array of brightly coloured objects she has amassed, set off against the light-reflective gloss black surface of the ceiling and walls, gives a dramatic impact that is anything but gothic.
A framed picture of Gallop with Tom Ford sits next to a genuine Gucci crash helmet and a Gucci chainsaw, a work of art by the San Francisco artist Peter Gronquist. When Ford designed for Gucci and YSL, she wore nothing else.
When Gallop briefed the designers of The Apartment, an inventive way to put her 200+ pairs of designer shoes on permanent display was near the top of the list. They suggested running exhibition-style shelving along the whole street-side wall at floor level; the shoes are as much art objects as footwear.
A pair of stag’s heads – Maurice and Charles – named after the Saatchi brothers and the first pieces of taxidermy that Cindy bought, flank a Chanel AK47 by the artist Peter Gronquist.