Watch Interior Designer Explains Every Decision Behind This SoHo Loft Renovation | Behind the Design

Watch Interior Designer Explains Every Decision Behind This SoHo Loft Renovation | Behind the Design

[bright upbeat music]

When we first saw the loft,

I wanted it to feel sensual and a bit mysterious as well.

When people walk into the space,

I want their clothes to immediately fall off their body.

I think you can start to understand

how that might be the case.

The project in total took just over two years.

There were definitely some challenges along the way,

and this is essentially where we started.

I’m Darren Jett.

I am the owner of Jett Projects based here in New York,

and today we are in the heart of SoHo

in a beautiful loft that we recently renovated.

When we first saw the loft, it was so nondescript.

There was nothing in here that really called attention

to what was cool about it.

The kitchen was just sort of there,

the bathrooms were just kind of there,

and it really didn’t highlight

the beautiful parts of this apartment

that I wanted to highlight.

Every neighborhood in New York is different,

but SoHo has a certain vernacular that is very specific.

It’s these old warehouse lots

that have been preserved really since the 1970s

when artists were moving in.

I really wanted to pull out the things that were specific,

and thought provoking, and interesting

because it’s not just about SoHo,

but it’s also my client and his lifestyle.

[upbeat music]

There’s the formal architectural language that we can use,

but I think what we were trying to achieve

was an emotional effect,

and we knew which tools to use to get us to that point.

The first things that were kind of firing off in my brain

were really about the 70s.

That was a huge jumping off point.

We were looking at a ton of different references

from Joe D’Urso, to Brace Shabel,

to the famous Calvin Klein apartment back in the day.

I wanted carpeted platforms.

I wanted black and white. I wanted some starkness.

I wanted things to be sleek, lots of glass block,

lots of gridded tiles, lots of low-slung furniture,

lots of built-in furniture, lots of wall-to-wall carpet.

Things that I think people might be a little afraid of,

I was really willing to really go there,

and luckily my client was also so game.

For me, the biggest challenges

were getting light into the apartment.

It was the economics of the renovation,

and it was the layout,

packing everything that we could into a limited floor plan.

[bright music]

It was pretty dark, so I was pretty quick to say

let’s embrace what we have.

Let’s maybe embrace some of the darkness.

Let’s think about a long hallway

that’s all one deep dark color

that is this sort of transition zone from the outside world

into your beautiful new apartment.

The contrast between the light and the dark

makes the light spaces feel lighter.

Tenets of Louis Kahn, Frank Lloyd Wright,

the idea of compression, the idea of release,

these are all architectural ideas

that I think drive home the light and dark.

The bedroom here got some light,

but I didn’t really wanna call attention to the bedroom

whenever you are in the living room.

I wanted the bedroom to sort of fade away,

so we decided let’s paint the bedroom black.

We’re creating a multitude of spaces within one space.

We have a large open area,

but we’re starting to carve out special segments within that

to get a lighter feeling apartment where we wanted it.

[upbeat music]

The finishes in the kitchen

are all about sleek, all about sexy.

We used marble, but instead of doing honed finishes,

I wanted to think about making it polished

to where it would bounce the light into the apartment.

I really wanted to see a stainless steel kitchen.

So the materiality, it definitely references

the sort of industrial past of SoHo.

Stainless steel has this beautiful effect

where it’s sort of half polished and it’s half matte,

sort of a satin effect.

So as the light changes throughout the day,

it really warms up,

the shadows dance beautifully across the surface,

and it really makes the space come alive.

There’s a lot of mirror in this apartment.

The core of the new kitchen and the new bathrooms,

the top two feet are wrapped in a mirror

that essentially reflects the tin ceilings

throughout the space.

We had a whole new HVAC system placed in this apartment.

There were window units at the time,

and I said, Absolutely not.

Will we have window units in a brand new renovation?

And so we dropped soffit up there

and had beautiful slotted HVAC in the mirror

that you can’t even really see

unless you know where to look.

[upbeat music]

One of the other big problems

was the layout of the apartment.

It was sort of open yet choppy at the same time.

We were gonna completely gut it,

but we also had very strict limitations

about what we could do in terms of wet over dry.

Wet over dry is essentially

where the rooms in the apartment that have plumbing,

the kitchen, the bathroom, the laundry room,

they have to be within a certain footprint.

The apartment below has a certain area

where the kitchen and bathrooms are,

and we could not go over that limit.

If there was a leak,

we can’t have any leaks happening in a dry area below.

The client had this vision from the beginning,

and he was like, I want this sort of a wet room,

an open shower with the tub in my apartment.

What we wanted to do was to keep the two bathrooms

and we also had to have a separate laundry room.

We also needed to have closet space.

There were no closets in this apartment whatsoever.

It was a really tall order.

Involved so many different layouts and sketching

until we could figure out how to get what he wanted.

And this is where we ended up.

The wet over dry aspect of the unit

actually helped us out because we realized

that we could sneak the kitchen into the living room

if we maintained an island that did not have plumbing.

So you can sort of see here where originally the kitchen

created a sort of U effect

at this point around these columns.

And by pushing that out

and making a sort of galley-style kitchen,

a sort of bar of storage here,

we really gained a lot of footprint in this area.

What we could do was sneak the laundry room

into the very, very back of the apartment.

And we knew that perhaps it would make sense

for the laundry room to be accessed through the main closet.

You know, you get ready, you have your clothes,

at the end of the day,

you put your clothes away by the washer dryer

with a built-in hamper.

What we wanted to do was to maintain that footprint,

but really dress it up,

really have something that felt very special, very unique.

What we have in this renovation,

we’ve managed to keep all of the original materiality

on the perimeter.

We have the original brick,

we have the original tin ceilings.

We simply painted it.

We painted it white or we painted it black.

To contrast that, we have this idea of a sort of cube

that lands in the apartment,

so we’re sort of standing in that threshold right now

between the old and the new.

It’s that original space between the public and the private.

This architectural intervention

where the stainless steel contrasts with the brick

and the tin ceilings, it’s a jewel box within a jewel box.

It feels very modern,

and at the same time it feels quite warm and inviting.

[upbeat music]

We were also working within a rather defined budget.

You know, we have this beautiful loft,

but we can’t spend a fortune renovating it,

and it needed a lot of work.

The first couple of times that we talked to contractors,

they were telling us numbers

that were three or four times the budget

that we had planned for,

so we had to be really, really intelligent

about the materials that we used.

For instance, in the bathrooms here,

we originally proposed doing a beautiful marble slab.

That, as an example, is perfect

because it again lends itself to that sort of 70s look.

The gridded tile, gridded patterns was very prominent then.

So even though we had economic constraints,

it led us to an aesthetic result

that was very true to our original references.

We have this really incredible round shower

made out of glass block.

Again, very SoHo, very 1970s. Also quite economical.

The shower was an element of the apartment

that really had a lot of different lives.

We had probably 20 different renderings of the shower.

And really it was incredibly important

for us from the beginning because,

you know, our client was like,

If someone’s taking a shower and I’m in bed,

I wanna sort of see a silhouette,

but I don’t wanna see everything.

So it was how do we achieve that?

The first thing that we tried to do was a ribbed glass.

If you are looking for ribbed glass that is curved,

good luck.

It is very, very, very expensive.

You have to go to Italy to find it,

and good luck getting it shipped

and into a New York City apartment.

We then decided to look at curved glass

that was maybe frosted,

but that felt a bit too millennial, a bit 2000s.

It really wasn’t the effect we were going for,

even though it was about half the cost of the fluted glass.

It wasn’t until down the process many, you know,

weeks of emailing people, and calling people,

and trying to speak Italian

that we arrived at doing glass block.

It was maybe a 10th of the cost of the original quote

of the fluted round glass.

And what’s crazy is that it was in front of us

the whole time in a way.

There were so many references

of all of these New York specific 1970s design books

where glass block was so prominent, and it was all in SoHo.

By doing the budget of the renovation,

the kitchen, the bathrooms, the moving of walls,

the creating of this sort of wet room scenario,

a lot of the budget was eaten up just in the architecture.

We didn’t have too much budget left over for furniture.

So down the road, as we got to that point,

we realized, okay, the built-in furniture

actually makes a ton of sense.

I could design the sofa

for half of the cost of buying something.

We could create a bed that felt

as though it was a part of the architecture,

a part of the floor even, for a third of the cost.

It’s always something that I’ve loved.

Every time I open up a book

and I see a built-in sofa or a built-in bed, it excites me.

I get a lot of requests for sunken living rooms

in all of my projects.

This one made the most sense to tackle that.

Have the sofa here. We have the bedroom behind me.

How can we have a sliding door that’s open,

but still have a separation in space?

We decided pretty early on

that this would be a great opportunity

to raise up a platform, to carpet it fully,

and to have a sort of rise and fall

from the bedroom to the living room.

It’s an emotional thing.

You sort of step up and then you release into the bedroom.

You have this carpeted platform

that really lends itself well into just going up the wall

into the bed, into the headboard.

And what it does in the living room

is that it creates the base of the sofa.

And this was a reference directly

from Gia Lente’s apartment in Milan

where she had a wraparound sofa carpeted,

and you have these cushions that sit on top,

and it creates this sort of low-slung sofa situation

where, you know, you can fit 22 people,

25 people around here very easily.

[upbeat music]

And I felt kind of like Anne Hathaway

in Devil Wears Prada when I got this project.

As soon as I saw the address and I saw the building,

I was like, This is very, very exciting.

There’s a lot to work with here.

Yes, we dove into all of the details,

and we were up late at night and in the morning

refining cove lighting details, and corner details,

and mitering, and all of the things

that make a project happen.

But I would say that really from the first couple of weeks,

the overall vision, the overall concept,

was really driven home.

And from the beginning until the end of that design process,

we really did not stray too far from where we started.

[gentle music]

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