DesignerJessie Schusterknew she’d found “the one”—that elusive decorating inspiration point—when she laid eyes on a pink marble Angelo Mangiarotti coffee table on a trip to Amsterdam. “I bought the table and designed my whole apartment around it,” she says. But when it arrived ten weeks later, the shipperdropped the table off the crate, shattering the item that was set to play the starring role in the design of her Manhattan home into a million pieces.
Decorating is often about improvising, as many designers know, and as Jessie’s bohemian-meets-French-modern apartment came to prove. For the designer, whose recent credits include the equally boho-chicBroken Coconutrestaurant in Noho, the mishap meant shifting her focus back to the features of the apartment that drew her in to begin with: its modern lines, sleek white walls, and floor-to-ceiling windows that open up over the Hudson River.
“野生”architecture, as Jessie describes it, felt like the inside of a spaceship when she moved in, and was the perfect blank slate to layer on the French antiques and stash of art and tchotchkes she’d accumulated throughout her years as a designer. “I wanted to bring a crucible and a nonmodern aesthetic to the apartment to counterbalance the architecture,” she says. Here’s how she pulled it off, nailing just the right mix of high and low, eclectic and refined.
Mixing old and new
Forgoing the “finished” look
