Tour 7 New York Loft Apartments That Epitomize Downtown Cool

Sky-high ceilings, large windows, and open floor plans are among the many interior details that attract artists, performers, and executives alike to New York loft apartments. While many of these homes—or rather, the buildings they are housed in—were initially constructed as factories, their ample light and wide open spaces are exactly what make them so appealing as living areas too. Plus, industrial-leaning elements add distinct personality, which is a natural fit for fashionable dwellers of SoHo, Tribeca, and the other downtown Manhattan neighborhoods where these apartments tend to be located. Below, we’ve chosen seven of our favorite New York loft apartments featured by AD. 

A Reimagined Tribeca Penthouse

When interior designers Anishka Clarke and Niya Bascom of the Brooklyn-based Ishka Designs first got their hands on the penthouse apartment of a buzzy Tribeca factory building conversion, it needed a lot of work. The fireplace had to be shifted to balance out the living room. Ceilings and hallways had to be totally reconfigured. But if you stepped into the airy, modern home today, you wouldn’t notice any of that.

“Now you walk in, and it feels right,” Clarke says of the project, which was made in conjunction with contractor Pompa Development & Construction. “That’s how we like to work. We try not to be excessive with anything. It should just feel how it ought to feel.”

That light touch is what appealed to the clients, a young couple who work in the entertainment industry (he is a Korean American filmmaker, and she is a Japanese musician). The pair, who tapped Ishka in 2016 to create a home base for them in New York, needed a place where they could work, entertain, and, as it so happened, hunker down for a global pandemic. Trusting Ishka’s subdued, craftsmanship-forward style, they gave the designers, more or less, carte blanche. —Hannah Martin

The Refined Abode of a Million Dollar Listing Agent

After touring a potential client’s penthouse loft in SoHo to discuss bringing it on the market in late 2019, Steve Gold, celebrity real estate agent and star of Bravo’s Million Dollar Listing New York, eventually cut to the chase. “As I left, I ended up saying, ‘I’m happy to sell it for you, but I’ll also buy it from you,’” he recalls.

The would-be client, as it turned out, was New York City gallerist Sean Kelly, who’d lived in the top-floor property for over two decades. “My girlfriend, Luiza, and I were pregnant with our daughter, Rose, and I was living in a really cool development in Chelsea, but had been thinking about getting a bigger space,” says Gold. “I see a lot of places—all the time—and this had incredible bones and proportions, and I saw the potential.” As penthouse lofts stack up, this particular property, clocking in at around 3,400 square feet, has three exposures instead of the usual two, including a nearly 50-foot wall with south-facing windows overlooking the quaint cobblestones below. 

Enlisting the help of his longtime friend and frequent collaborator, interior designer Samuel Amoia, the pair completely transformed the energy and flow of the expansive, well-lit space. “Steve has a very modernist aesthetic,” explains Amoia. “He wanted that to translate into the space without sacrificing all the great things about having a [SoHo] loft—high ceilings, exposed beams, and incredible windows.”—David Nash

A Period-Piece-Inspired NoHo Home

Michael Tomei was beaming when he logged on for our interview from his apartment in New York City. His genius for infusing modern interiors with furnishings with rich patina is evident in his meticulously-designed, 2,100-square-foot, two-bedroom loft that he shares with his partner, Peter, and a rescue dog named Huxley.

Gut renovating the space in a century-old warehouse building in Manhattan’s NoHo district signaled a major gear-shift for Tomei, who used to conceptualize store displays and fashion shows for brands like Calvin Klein, Balenciaga, and Lanvin. Opening Michael Vincent Design in 2019 allowed him to devote his energy to rescuing old buildings and time-worn furniture, and—not to mention—binge-watch BBC period films for inspiration. “If they have a powdered face and a wig on, or if the men are prettier than women, I’m in,” he jokes. —Anne Quito

A Greige Space in SoHo

In a perfect world, an interior designer and a client are completely in tune, two minds thinking as one. There’s no need to explain the appeal of asymmetry, say, or the joy of splurging on hand-painted wallpaper. This is just the kind of synchrony that designer Jessie Schuster experienced while working on her latest project, the renovation of a spacious Manhattan loft inside an old factory in SoHo. “We went to look at the apartment together and both fell in love with it right away,” says Schuster of the early-1900s property purchased by her client. “It had heavy dark floors and strangely raised bathrooms, yet we agreed the raw bones were just amazing.” It helped, of course, that Schuster’s client happened to be her little sister Alexandra, who was looking for a new home for her growing family. “She’s always been a tastemaker for me, and even when she pushes me I know I’m going to be happy in the end,” says the younger Schuster. “She really gets me and I fully trust her.”

The sisters decided to preserve many of the details that gave the apartment its gritty New York character—things like exposed pipes and moldings that were cracked or flawed—while adding doses of European sophistication. “We wanted to keep it feeling very SoHo,” says the designer. “The idea was to create something raw but elevated, with a juxtaposition of contemporary and vintage furniture.” Schuster took cues from Belgian designer Axel Vervoordt, known for his expressive take on simplicity and his preference for lime-washed walls that look beautifully weathered. She covered most of the apartment in a greige lime wash from Domingue Architectural Finishes, leaving many walls undecorated or hung with a single artwork. The effect is stark and serene. —Paola Singer

Vivid Hues Pop in an eBay Executive’s Apartment

It figures that the idea of sharing an address with an art house cinema would appeal to Bradford Shellhammer. The New York–based eBay executive has a habit of redecorating his living quarters with such regularity that it might rival the rotation of movies in the theater below. Every Shellhammer production tends to be colorful, theatrical, obsessively organized, and genial. The impeccable 2,800-square-foot Greenwich Village loft he shares with husband Georgi Balinov is no exception. “These walls weren’t orange two weeks ago,” Shellhammer greeted me, his smile discernible behind the face mask. “I rotate or swap out furniture; I trade and sell things,” he explains. “Otherwise I get bored.”

Balinov and Shellhammer had only been at the apartment for a year when COVID-19 shut down much of New York City. They spent a year and a half renovating the space that was once a method acting school run by the great theater actor Lee Strasburg. “We’d lived in Airbnbs and friends’ places for 19 months, and it was tiring not having a home, not having most of our things. My art! My toys! My shoes! Those months taught me how important a home, a safe place, and the oasis of my collections is to my mental health,” Shellhammer wrote in his blog to mark the month they moved in. —Anne Quito

A Concert Violinist’s Union Square Home Base

Even before they embarked on the renovation of a 3,000-square-foot loft overlooking New York’s Union Square, Max Worrell and Jejon Yeung, co-principals of Brooklyn architecture studio Worrell Yeung, and Jean Lin—of the cooperative gallery, design studio, and strategy firm Colony—knew they wanted the interplay of its fundamental geometries to help fuel their design. The loft in question occupies the entire third floor of a triangular, Renaissance Revival-style building designed in 1899 by the German architect Robert Maynicke—a pioneer of these types of modern spaces.

A custom metal screen-slash-bookcase near the home’s front door draws from the surrounding streets, while a curved soffit introduces circular elements that punctuate the entire scheme. Wide-plank white oak floorboards run perpendicular to the exterior roadways, and simultaneously unite the different zones inside the home.

“The subtle shifts and angles were created as a nod to the importance of the New York grid and the dynamic disruption of Broadway,” Yeung says. His collaboration with Lin yielded an interior that transformed the loft into an elegant home which can comfortably pivot from tranquil refuge to lively gathering place. Often that means recitals, as one of the homeowners is a concert violinist. —Troy J. McMullen

A 19th-Century Art-Filled Escape

When the owner of this New York loft called on Gachot Studios, an AD100 design firm, the original idea was to give the space a surface-level refresh. “But when you pull the thread on the sweater, it slowly unravels,” says John Gachot, who runs the practice with his wife, Christine. Perched on the top three floors of a late 19th-century building in Soho with a “premier cast-iron facade that’s right out of the book,” the loft had had work done, but “hadn’t been lived in for a while and felt a little dated,” John says. As talks progressed, the client, who works in the fashion industry, decided to go deeper with the renovation to make the home truly feel like his own.

The penthouse boasts large floor plates with the public spaces located underneath the primary bedroom suite, which is flanked on both sides with outdoor terraces and capped with a rooftop garden. “The client is a great host and wanted to make the place comfortable whether for two people or 20,” John says, “so we addressed moments of intimacy and expansiveness.” —Jenny Xie