When Deborah French first moved to the area now known as Tribeca, as an art student in the late ’70s, she dreamed about living in the loft across the way. “The couple had a carousel horse mounted from floor to ceiling for their daughter, and I used to be able to see it from my old building,” the sculptor-turned-interior designer recalls. A year later, while looking for a new apartment, she came across an ad for a space on nearby Duane Street and made an appointment. “I walked in and said, ‘Oh my god! This is it! It’s that place!’”
Almost 40 years later, she still lives there, though it, like French herself, has gone through quite a few transformations. “My friends and I used to roller skate around in here,” the curly haired designer says of those art-school days. “The apartment went the whole length of the building, and it was $425 a month.”
You can’t roller skate here anymore. The space is smaller — French turned the back part into another apartment — yet, it still feels open, inviting.
“I want people to come here, and I want to come here, and feel relaxed but surrounded by beauty,” says French. “I want it to be comforting on a spiritual level.”
French first redid the apartment after purchasing it in the ’80s — following stints creating puppets for Jim Henson — while working as a sittings editor at Vogue. Yet her big design break came after moving with her (now-ex) husband to Greece, where she oversaw the creation of their expansive stone house.
“I was really approaching it as a sculptor,” she says. “I was just creating something.” That construction landed her jobs at Ralph Lauren and Ian Schrager, before she launched her own firm, Deborah French Designs.
In 2006 — back in the Tribeca loft and working for Lauren — new building changes required her to redo her apartment once again. Inspired by a book of Sienese Renaissance painters, she went
for a gold, lapis and crimson palette. “I felt I was curating,” she says. “As long as [an object] was beautiful and not out of left field, I knew it would work.”
The space brims with a mixture of far-flung treasures, custom pieces and her own sculptures. An antique Indian gate separates the limestone-slab dining table from the living area. A low wooden “bride’s chair” from Afghanistan sits by a coffee table made of an antique window.
As for seasonal decorating, French’s approach has evolved over the years as well. “I used to get the fattest tree, and decorate it with things I had collected over the years, like found objects from Asia and sun-bleached bone from the Southwest and paper-mâché masks from Indonesia. And, of course, Sesame Street characters and precious things from my mother,” she says. But since her son moved out, French is happy to pass the bulk of the tradition to her sister who hosts at her home outside of New York.
French views her loft as complete. “There’s not one thing I’m not happy with, though sometimes I fantasize about having a country house. There are things I see that are so beautiful that I can’t buy, and I think, ‘If only . . .’ ”
Photos by Brett Beyer
Prop styling by Brice Gaillard