This SoHo Loft by Lee F. Mindel is Anything But Soulless

2021 Best of Year winner for Large Apartment

You’d never guess that, before Lee F. Mindel came on the scene, this airy SoHo loft, home to a young art consultant, was a soulless, cookie-cutter three-bedroom in a new development. The firm principal blasted open the 4,400-square-foot floor plan—replacing Sheetrock with white-lacquered panels, white-oak partitions, and glass pocket doors—to instate more gracious spatial proportions and flowier circulation. Mindel’s strategy for giving grandeur to the standard-issue anodized-aluminum windows was to “thicken” the walls around them and darken their boxy depth in a manner reminiscent of Donald Judd sculptures. The result is akin to “dioramas framing views of the neighboring cast-iron historic buildings,” the Interior Design Hall of Fame member explains. “Plus, the added depth creates the illusion you’re in a masonry building.” Eschewing drop ceiling and downlights in favor of exposing the full volume of the space, Mindel installed luminous LED blades—rectangular in the living room, circular in the dining area—that lend activation overhead. “The idea,” the architect notes, “was that the ceiling, with these De Stijl–like overlapping graphics, become its own artistic plane.” Other than the living room’s Pierre Paulin sofa and the Maarten Baas dining chairs, furnishings are custom, designed by the firm to suit the newly salonlike spaces.

sheltonmindel: Lee F. Mindel