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On a quiet residential street in Arlington, Virginia, one garage is not like the others. Clad in white corrugated steel, the structure is tall and thin with a sharply peaked roof, suggesting a giant pencil poking up through the earth. And while its neighbours might house minivans and power tools, on a grey December afternoon the door to this one, which is not really a garage at all, opens to reveal a cross-shaped plywood table set, 

as if for a meal, with brightly coloured wares. At the centre of the spread are a pair of ornately dimpled pastel-glazed earthenware vases by the French ceramist Saraï Delfendahl, each the size and silhouette of a baby elephant’s foot. A chubby-armed sky blue ceramic chandelier by the New York-based artist Braxton Congrove hangs from the ceiling. The 12 unique place settings feature, among other items, an orange tumbler with three spiky legs by the New York-based artist and tableware designer Grace Whiteside and a clay oyster plate inlaid with shells by the ceramist Michele Mirisola of Brooklyn. Surprising even the gallerist Margaret Bakke, the curator of this exhibition, some of the artists had taken her concept of a dinner party-themed show several steps further by contributing unsolicited additions, including two punch bowls and a poodle-topped butter dish.

Bakke established this place, which she named Friends Artspace, in 2021 after unexpectedly discovering that her long-held desire to run a gallery dovetailed with a local zoning law. She and her husband, Jesus Canales, were building a house for themselves and their family on a modest corner lot when they learned its footprint could be expanded, as she recalls it, by erecting a free-standing garage on the property. The two-storey structure they envisioned, some six metres away from their new home, would, Bakke realised, enable her to fulfill her dream of exhibiting artistic work in a familial environment. She inaugurated the 30-square-metre gallery space with a group show comprising 14 fantastical one-of-a-kind mirrors and, though she has a background in fine art — she studied at Columbia University before working at the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies, the school’s nonprofit print shop, and later became an art consultant in Washington, DC — the exhibitions she’s mounted since then have mostly emphasised collectible design, often by emerging talents. “Design is so approachable and easy to love,” she says, “because we all benefit from it.”

Despite her training as a painter and printmaker, Bakke prefers seeking out the work of others. As a result, her house — a stark but inviting rectangular box with a black stucco facade and large rear windows overlooking a neat yard — is filled with unusual creations sourced from vintage stores and art collected over the years, often from other small galleries. “I just love objects,” she says, sitting on a bulbous pink velvet-upholstered Mario Bellini sofa in the compact parlour — just off the home’s 65-square-metre, open-plan living area — where she meets with clients, usually over tea. “In a way, the gallery is an extension of my love of collecting, because I don’t want to be a hoarder,” she adds with a laugh. Her home, in turn, sometimes accommodates overflow inventory: on a recessed shelf behind her, arranged among several antiques shop vases, are a pair of delicate candy-coloured ceramic cake stands by the New York artist Francesca DiMattio waiting to be shipped to clients. “People can’t believe kids live here,” says Bakke.

But the couple designed the house as much for their three young children as for themselves. It is just one storey, and thus toddler friendly. A playroom, strewn with spill-concealing patterned Moroccan rugs, sits between the living room and the three bedrooms. The tropical-print sofa in the main room, which Bakke bought on eBay for about $750, arrived already lightly stained. And while her collection contains valuable pieces — a large mirrored one by the Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, with whom Bakke worked at the Columbia print shop, is securely fastened to a wall behind a powder blue resin Sabine Marcelis dining table — she tries not to be overly precious about them. In front of the living room fireplace, which is framed by a Brutalist limestone mantelpiece, is an eight-legged coffee table by the Brooklyn-based designer Misha Kahn, whose work Bakke has shown, made from scraps of stainless steel inset with jewel-like glass discs the size of dinner plates — a room-transforming artwork strong enough for her children to dance on, as they sometimes do.

On a practical level, Bakke’s practice of blurring the boundary between work and home allows her to run Friends Artspace; when necessary, her children can be with her during appointments. But the endeavour is also part of her larger vision of a more humane art world in which institutions recognise that creativity can be a collective endeavour strengthened by the ties of family and community — one that, importantly, needn’t take place in a major city. Bakke eventually wants to have a studio above the gallery and a place for artists to stay. For now, though, that dream is most fully realised at her openings. Increasingly, neighbours stop by along with artists and collectors. And there’s always sidewalk chalk for the children, who cover the paved driveway with works of their own. 

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Five years ago, at the San Telmo flea market in Buenos Aires, the New York-based interior designer Nicholas Obeid saw a midcentury chandelier in perforated red metal that he admired but didn’t want to carry home on the plane.

A year later, he was still thinking about that chandelier and, on his next trip, he was surprised to find the $100 piece right where he’d last seen it. (Obeid’s mother was born in Argentina, and he visits the country whenever he can.) Now rewired, it hangs in the kitchen of his Greenwich Village apartment, above a stainless steel baker’s rack. “I saw something similar on 1stDibs for thousands of dollars,” Obeid says. “Almost identical.”

The fixture is emblematic of Obeid’s approach: the designer, who’s in his 30s, scours the globe — in person and online — for deals on well-made, unconventional vintage pieces. (“The objects I’m after have spirit,” he says.) He then juxtaposes them with idiosyncratic furnishings in a variety of heavily textured materials (“silk, mohair, metal, glass, leather, wood, more wood, a different shade of wood, marble, shearling”, as he puts it), within his own 53-square-metre apartment and those of his clients. Over the past five years, he’s also designed dozens of his own pieces, reimagining everything from sprawling leather modular sofas to cement side tables to ebonised oak lamps and brass wall sconces.

Often, he conceives of these while working out of his rental, which he moved into in 2020 and has since transformed into a calming refuge. Located on the third floor of a walk-up apartment block, above the poster shops and piercing parlours that fill the blocks just south of NYU, the compact space — the kitchen serves as a vestibule for the bedroom and living room — is united by a colour scheme of butter and walnut. In the bedroom, there’s a whitewashed bespoke night stand made from bleached acacia wood. Above it hangs a framed 1975 charcoal drawing by the San Francisco Bay Area artist Laura Lengyel, the matting of which he had cut to mimic the lines of the tubular task lamp beneath it — another Buenos Aires find. The ivory-painted wall opposite the low, minimalist bed is blank. “My mind races,” Obeid says. “I need serenity.”

That sense of tranquillity extends to the seven-by-four-metre terrace stretching the length of the apartment. There’s enough room for a dining table, which he often drapes in olive green linen and, near it, a sitting area with vintage wicker hoop chairs where he starts his day with coffee, he says, “reading in the dead quiet with the sun hitting me”.

Obeid grew up in Troy, Michigan, where his father, a trauma surgeon, had emigrated from Syria for a medical residency. The designer recalls spending Sunday brunches — when his aunts, uncles and cousins would gather in his home for eggs and manousheh — immersed in design magazines and sharing his discoveries. 

After college at Michigan State University, Obeid turned a summer internship at the New York office of the potter and designer Jonathan Adler into a full-time job, in which he ran the creative services department and produced photo shoots. He stayed there for seven years; during his off hours, he created spaces for friends and family, before starting his own firm in 2018. The following year, he began working with CB2, which has since released more than 40 pieces of his furniture, lighting and objects.

Increasingly, his home has become a showcase for these works, too, positioned alongside his custom furnishings (a coverlet made from two different linens, one by the nearly 150-year-old Spanish textile house Gastón y Daniela) and vintage finds (the rattan settee on the terrace, which he found at a Michigan flea market during the pandemic). Every piece, he says, has meaning. “When you love your home, you are obviously happier,” he adds. “You can go about your life with clarity and confidence.”

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• In This Edwardian Townhouse, the Bathrooms Set the Tone

By her own admission, the actor Anastasia Graff is a maximalist who loves “girlie things,” so it’s not altogether surprising that she wanted a periwinkle kitchen for her 1930s-era West Hollywood home. Still, such a bold choice could send some interior designers into a tailspin. “It’s rare,” admits Frances Merrill, who Graff enlisted to refurbish the 2,600-square-foot house, “that you have a client pushing you to be more colorful.” Since founding her firm, Reath Design, in 2009, she has become known for her elegant use of unexpected palettes and patterns. And so, “when she said purple,” Merrill continues, “I was like, ‘Hell yeah.’”

From the outside, the two-story three-bedroom house, set in the hills just above Sunset Boulevard, is more restrained than flamboyant. Clad in white-painted wood siding with a wide porch, it had appealed to Graff because it reminded her of the traditional wooden homes on the East Coast, where she grew up. But it didn’t hurt that the place is part of local lore: It once belonged to the Russian-born composer and conductor Igor Stravinsky, who lived in Los Angeles from 1940 to 1969, while he conducted the L.A. Philharmonic both downtown and at the Hollywood Bowl. During that time, he also made inroads in the film industry, notably allowing his 1913 masterpiece, “The Rite of Spring,” to be used in the 1940 animated Disney feature “Fantasia” — a history that inspired Merrill to decorate the home with alternating notes of gravitas and whimsy. “You realize in Los Angeles, there’s a story behind every house,” says Graff. “That’s how they sell you. They’re like, ‘Marilyn Monroe’s ghost walks the property!’”

Graff had long been saving images with a view to one day create her dream home and sent them to Merrill for inspiration. There were pictures of classic American diners and screenshots of Slim Aarons’s louche, glamorous photographs. She also cited the work of the print-loving American decorator Dorothy Draper and of the designer David Hicks, a master of British eclecticism. Graff wanted to avoid the austerity of the many white modernist boxes that populate Los Angeles and instead lean into the grandeur of old Hollywood design — a vision that naturally aligned with Merrill’s preferences for saturated colours and lively juxtapositions. When the pair’s collaboration began, during the early days of the pandemic, “it was like having a pen pal,” says Graff, to whom Merrill would send packages of paint swatches in the mail.

In the kitchen, Merrill manifested the purple Graff had requested in the form of mauve cabinets with softly rounded corners that suggest both the glossy futurism and laminated lunch counters of the 1950s — an effect heightened by a scalloped stainless-steel oven hood. Their color is offset by a traditional checkerboard linoleum floor and an orange leather banquette where the family share their meals (Graff and her husband have two young children). Vintage lights, one shaped like an orange and another like a lemon, add some California kitsch, and a 1970s-era poster for the French release of “Fantasia” is a tribute to Stravinsky.

Graff and Merrill also found common ground in their shared love of wallpaper, choosing a dense floral pattern — pulled from the archives of the 226-year-old French company Zuber — for the dining room, and a Pierre Frey panther print for the powder room. “But we wanted the house to be coherent, and not go too crazy on the eye,” Graff says. So, in the former room, the busy motif is tempered by the streamlined silhouette of an oval lacquered wood table by the Swedish architect turned designer Gustaf Westman. That table is, however, bubble gum pink — “like Barbie in space,” she says.

Jewel-box shades of purple and pink are another through line. There’s the hyper-feminine, almost camp, salmon pink closet and dressing room just off the primary bedroom, where a Murano glass pendant in the shape of a heart — a light fixture fit for a Disney princess — hangs above an island with a scarlet crystal quartzite countertop. Directly adjoining is the primary bathroom, which contains a free-standing porcelain tub and a shower lined with amethyst purple tiles. And downstairs, the main foyer is a moody shade of rosé pink complemented by a banquette upholstered in a striped coral pink Dedar textile.

But Graff’s favorite space, the family room, is — at least in contrast to the rest of the house — relatively subdued, a reprieve from all the ebullience. A hand-painted silk de Gournay wallpaper in a tranquil shade of pistachio is illuminated by an Eos ceiling lamp that resembles a fluffy orb of exploding feathers. And while there are a few other florid gestures — including a chair with a daisy-shaped back by the London- and Milan-based Artefatto Design Studio — the room was designed with relaxation in mind, its layout centered on a pair of custom shell pink velvet couches, placed back to back. “It’s just a soothing and beautiful space,” Graff says.

For Merrill, though, an arrangement of subtly contrasting pieces in the living room best represents the lush, collagelike feeling of the house. Between two windows stands a vibrantly colorful Fratelli Levaggi chair — a reproduction of a classic 1950s turned-leg style that Merrill had repainted in vivid shades of cornflower blue, marigold and Kelly green — beneath an angular modern dark green glass sconce. Just as Los Angeles’s mishmash of architectural eras results in moments of unexpected beauty, the home’s clash of periods and styles is somehow harmonious — and, most of all, joyful. It’s a wide-ranging approach to design that Hollywood has long shared. Indeed, not long after the house was finished, Merrill and Graff caught word of the traveling exhibition “Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts,” which charted the animator’s little-known obsession with Rococo French design and how it influenced the look of everything from his cartoons to his theme parks. “When we saw that,” she says, “we were like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s what we were doing!’”

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When the British designer Russell Pinch was 22, he spent a night at Sarabhai House, a Modernist villa designed by the Swiss French architect Le Corbusier and set within a 20-acre park in Ahmedabad, India. Completed in 1955, the otherwise severe brick, concrete and plaster building has a 46-foot-long concrete slide that leads from a first-floor terrace to the swimming pool below. Pinch, then on his first trip abroad and employed as an assistant to the British designer Terence Conran, a friend of the Sarabhai family, was enthralled. “The Indian textiles and carpets layered on top of a concrete masterpiece, with a jungle outside — I was blown away,” he recalls. “I remember thinking, ‘I want to live in a house like this one day.’ ”

Pinch, now 50, has as good as realised that dream with his latest project: a former ice cream factory in southwest England that he has reimagined with his wife and business partner, Oona Bannon, 50, as a richly textured, midcentury-inflected weekend house for their family. Set in a lush valley in Devon, a county known for both its untamed moors and its traditional afternoon teas, the home embodies the elegance and warmth of Pinch, the furniture and lighting firm the couple co-founded in 2004. Drawing on the minimalist shapes of Scandinavian and Georgian-era British design and using traditional, long-lasting materials, the company creates timeless, unpretentious pieces: a slim-legged black walnut version of an 18th-century English cricket table; a hand-sprung sofa with dainty oak feet and rolled arms.

The house in Devon similarly balances crisp forms, simple materials and the occasional more luxurious touch. Pinch discovered the listing for the property in 2013. The lot came with a dilapidated cob barn and the rights to build a house; it was one of three parcels of land being portioned off by an enterprising dairy farmer who had recently sold his ice cream business and engaged the British architect David Kohn to propose designs for converting several now-disused buildings into a residential community. Their interest piqued, Pinch and Bannon went to see the place, only to be told an offer had already been accepted. During the four-hour drive back to their terraced Victorian home in South London, which they share with their two daughters, Ada, 15, and Floris, 14, they convinced each other that it would have been too onerous an undertaking anyway — and in a location that was too far to travel to for weekends. But several days later they received a phone call: the farmer felt hopeful the couple would respect his vision and invited them to make a competing offer. “We looked at each other and said, ‘Yes, please,’” recalls Pinch.

After two years of exchanging ideas with Kohn, what emerged was a plan for a 2,400-square-foot four-bedroom house arranged in a U shape around a central, Japanese-inspired courtyard. One side would incorporate the old barn — thought to date to around 1600 and the erstwhile home of the ice cream factory — and would accommodate two bedrooms. The new elements, containing an open-plan living area and two more bedrooms, would be clad with local red stone and inset with outsize concrete-framed windows providing uninterrupted views of the surrounding farmland. The roof and chimney would be outlined in reclaimed red bricks. For the floors, stairs, shelving and cabinetry, Pinch and Bannon chose honey-coloured planks of lightly bleached Douglas fir, which they ordered from the Danish manufacturer Dinesen and mostly installed themselves. “It was like the worst jigsaw puzzle of your life,” says Pinch. “And it’s actually a softwood, which I wouldn’t recommend to a customer. But we like the patina and big knots, which give it such character.”

By 2019, the couple had furnished a few rooms provisionally — with prototype furniture from their London shop, which had opened earlier that year, and secondhand pieces sourced from antiques stores in the nearby town of Ashburton. They began escaping there every other weekend, despite their initial concern about the distance from London. “We really needed to be in here to understand how we wanted it to feel,” says Bannon. But one night in November, when the house was nearly finished, the couple were woken by a loud crack. Heavy rain had caused a flash flood, and not only was their kitchen under several feet of water but the poured concrete floor had risen up and buckled, leaving the dining table touching the ceiling light. Pinch and Bannon spent the next few weeks trying to drain the property. By the following March, Britain had entered the first of its Covid lockdowns, during which the project’s original builders filed for bankruptcy.

In the aftermath of this upheaval, Pinch and Bannon returned, for reassurance, to a small balsa-wood maquette of the home that Pinch had made during the planning phase. “It was symbolic of our intention,” says Bannon. “It was always about the promise of something in the future, not about instant gratification.” And so even when a surveyor, assessing the wreckage, jokingly suggested that the couple turn the kitchen into a swimming pool, they were undeterred. They laid a complex new system of pumps beneath the kitchen, repoured the floor and slowly began to put their house back together. “We were so involved in it, we couldn’t let it fail,” says Pinch. “It was more than just a house.”

Today, visitors reach the home via a flagstone path that bisects the property’s abundant kitchen garden — planted with cabbage, fennel and broccoli — and leads to its stainless-steel front door, a nod to the site’s agricultural past. With expansive panels of glass connecting the various structures to each other and to the garden beyond, the building is a dramatic exploration of perspective. In addition to the Sarabhai House, which inspired the home’s concrete floors and geometric forms, Pinch and Bannon took cues from Turn End, a 1960s modernist house in southeast England designed by the British architect Peter Aldington. Characterised by unadorned interior spaces and teeming exterior ones, that building convinced the couple to keep the cinder-block walls of their own home’s new additions exposed, to install giant windows and to cultivate a riotous garden. “It’s all about the views,” says Oona. “From every room, you have a real experience of things growing.”

The combination of concrete and glass could be austere, but the couple have softened the effect with sheepskin-strewn velvet sofas, rush matting and shelves filled with Japanese earthenware and potted Chinese money plants, creating a space that feels welcoming and deeply personal. The furniture is mostly of their own design, though there is the odd vintage piece, including a 1950s Rex chair by the Slovenian designer Niko Kralj, a French flea market find that now sits in the living room. Hanging from a kitchen wall are woven baskets from Greece, and above the dining table and in the upstairs bathroom are colorful abstract paintings by the Polish Swedish artist Agnieszka Barlow, a friend of the couple’s, purchased from an exhibition of her work at the Pinch store in London.

From the old barn, whose bedrooms are occupied by the couple’s daughters, a wide windowed corridor leads past the central courtyard to the main open-plan living space. Down a couple of steps, a library and seating area with a dramatic high ceiling and recessed fireplace give on to a sunken kitchen and dining room where, in late May, golden light streams through a continuous band of windows, offering views over a one-acre wildflower meadow that slopes upward from the back of the house. In the upstairs bedrooms and bathroom, picture windows frame the woodland and fruit orchard beyond. The couple worked with the British landscape architect James Hamilton on their plans for the grounds, establishing almost 3,000 plants and more than 500 trees, including sessile oaks, field maples, goat willows, walnuts and bird cherries.

Spending vacations and long weekends at the house has introduced a gentler, more freewheeling spirit to the couple’s professional output. Their company’s round yew Roden table, one of which anchors the home’s Douglas fir-clad library, has a chunkier profile than most of Pinch’s pieces and was designed with that room in mind, as was the large, globe-shaped, plant-fibre Soren lantern that hangs above it. Pinch and Bannon describe their house as “kind” and “gentle,” and the slower pace of life it invites, with its intimate corners for reading and daydreaming, feels soothing. Days here begin with walks to a nearby cove for a swim, followed by a seafood lunch on the raised terrace, and end with drowsy evening soaks in the cast-iron roll-top bath. “Time,” says Bannon, “takes on a funny quality here.”

Editors’ picks:

• In His Own Home, an Interior Stylist Takes a Light Touch
• Five Things On Our Radar This Week
• In This Edwardian Townhouse, the Bathrooms Set the Tone

In 1900, about a month before dying, Oscar Wilde is rumored to have looked around his accommodations at the Hôtel d’Alsace, the derelict Parisian pension house where he spent his final days, and said, “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.” More than 120 years later, another flamboyant expat found himself on rue des Beaux-Arts at an only slightly less dire impasse.

In December 2021, the Russian-born architect and furniture designer Harry Nuriev relocated from New York, where he’d lived since 2017, to Paris in search of inspiration. Although the plan was to find an airy loft on the right bank, he and his partner, Tyler Billinger, 27, a former fashion publicist and the C.E.O. of Nuriev’s design firm, Crosby Studios, opted instead for a 1,200-square-foot rental apartment across the Seine in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Each room in the 18th-century home had been painted the same emotionless hue. “I want to say it was pistachio beige?” says Nuriev, 38, disdainfully, while seated on a Barbie-pink camping stool in his so-called capsule kitchen. The steel-framed, glass-walled structure is about one-third the size of the former dining room it occupies and conjures the set of a sci-fi movie, or perhaps an RV on Mars.

But instead of covering every wall with glossy gray tiles, as the couple had done in their ultramodern one-bedroom NoLIta duplex, Nuriev chose to embrace the storied romance of his adoptive city, creating ashen, trompe l’oeil wallpaper with a crumbling, fungal motif and pasting it up in multiple rooms. “I want to keep the whole heritage and embrace it, but I also have my own ideas and I didn’t want them to kill each other,” says the designer, whose first Paris solo show, “Denim,” which opened at Carpenters Workshop gallery earlier this month, includes objects — a weight-training bench, a turntable — wrapped entirely in the rugged fabric.

Nuriev grew up in the agricultural city of Stavropol, in southwestern Russia, the eldest of three children raised by a handyman father and a homemaker mother. As a child, he enjoyed rearranging his grandmother’s furniture but, he says, interior design always sounded to him like a preoccupation for “housewives from the Upper East Side.” Though he was interested in experimental fashion — “as a professional passenger,” he clarifies, meaning that he preferred buying clothes to making them — he ultimately enrolled at the Moscow Architectural Institute. It wasn’t until he founded Crosby Studios in 2014, just after graduating, that he began actively questioning why a credenza should be any less expressive than a cardigan — or, as he puts it, “How people could put on a conceptual gown and sit on a brown couch. It just doesn’t make any sense.”

As part of his mission to translate the language of clothing into interior design, Nuriev has created immersive and Instagrammable interiors — a digital environment for Valentino, a physical retail space for Paris’s Dover Street Little Market — often with just one bold color (neon blue, say, or electric green). In 2019, his Balenciaga sofa, an L-shaped couch stuffed with an array of the luxury house’s deadstock garments and wrapped in clear biodegradable film, became the talk of the Design Miami fair. At last year’s iteration, he debuted the Trash Bag sofa, a cluster of 15 glossy, foam-filled leather cushions, piled together as if awaiting a garbage truck on collection day, and a challenge to the sometimes-stodgy world of luxury design.

Since releasing his debut collection of geometric chairs and totemic shelves —  some in powder-coated stainless steel, others in brass — during New York design week in 2016, Nuriev has been described variously as a retrofuturist, a minimalist and a surrealist. Dissatisfied with these incomplete articulations of his artistic approach (or as he refers to it, his ongoing disagreement with reality), he made up a label of his own: transformism. “It comes from the idea of one thing transforming into something else,” he says. “But I don’t want to call it upcycling or recycling. Upcycling is just a technique — not a style. [My practice] comes from finding beauty somewhere no one wants to look.” For every piece of his inspired by fashion or art, there’s another that owes its existence to the everyday allure of a motor home, an Amazon delivery box, a headlight, a running shoe or a fax machine.

More than once during our conversation, Nuriev compares his new neighborhood in Paris’s Sixth Arrondissement to an Hermès Birkin bag: sophisticated yet traditional. “There are a lot of old ladies with little dogs,” says Billinger, a native of the San Francisco Bay Area. “And we’re wild,” adds Nuriev, who on this October afternoon is wearing a floor-length skirt, a midriff-baring wool sweater and a bandanna — all black — with gloopy acrylic pearls covering his nails. “Only yesterday I was walking in my heels and my crocodile dress, and they were like, ‘Ugh, fashion people.’”

To mitigate the shock of their arrival, Billinger and Nuriev decided to leave the apartment’s frame and parquet flooring alone. In fact, their engagement with the space is closer to an intervention than a renovation. Even the most disruptive elements — the glass-walled kitchen; a corridor to the bathroom wrapped entirely in denim — are temporary, capable of being easily broken down or torn off.

To the right of the entrance, in what was once the foyer, the couple’s bed can be found in another aseptic stainless-steel box. (The structure was manufactured in pieces and assembled in place.) The bed’s duvet cover and pillowcases, all made from a patchwork of worn underwear — “Mine,” Nuriev clarifies — offer a cheeky reminder that beds are for more than just sleeping. Nearby, a reclaimed refrigerator has been painted with blue flowers and reborn as a cabinet. Antiquated iPhones line a wall, their screens replaced with functional, albeit tiny, mirrors.

If the apartment is a laboratory for experimentation (it’s where the designer dreams up most of his creations), it’s also the experiment itself: Nuriev and Billinger both live here full time, among the former’s prototypes, constantly tweaking things like height and polish to make sure each object achieves Nuriev’s idea of perfection. A doorway connects the bedroom to the heart of the residence: a spacious dining atrium with a monumental square table and stools upholstered in distressed denim, a material that, according to Nuriev, “isn’t supposed to be in interior design.” That, of course, is its appeal. Stitched-together socks in a rainbow of colors form a rug that runs the length of the room.

In the office, also off the dining room, Nuriev’s silvery wallpaper with a bitmap print matches pink stools, pixelated at the edges and evoking the lo-fi quality of classic arcade cabinets, from his recent Video Game collection. Images relating to his various projects, many of them created for realities other than our own, are tacked above a shiny pink lacquered desk: One shows a brick-and-mortar clothing store in downtown Manhattan, conceived with the augmented reality fashion platform ZERO10, which sold NFTs by Nuriev depicting disappearing pants and shirts made of light; another includes a virtual circular sofa created from Nike puffer jackets. Next month, Rizzoli will publish Nuriev’s first monograph, “How to Land in the Metaverse: From Interior Design to the Future of Design,” which documents, among other things, his ongoing investigation into the digital realm.

Off the dining room, a living area is taken up almost entirely by a transparent-vinyl-wrapped sectional packed with the couple’s discarded clothes. (“I can’t remember sitting in a normal chair,” says Billinger.) Above a fireplace, computer keyboards Nuriev rescued from Paris sidewalks border an antique mirror that came with the apartment. “Think about how many disappointed emails were typed on those,” he says. “Thanks to them, I don’t have to look at an ugly wooden frame.”

In a corner of the room, tucked into a recess in the wall, is a roughly 35-by-24 inch maquette of the apartment that Nuriev built as he was reimagining the space. Almost everything is represented — there are pocket-size versions of the denim dining table, pink camping stools and sofa — except the home’s residents. “I have one goal,” says Nuriev. “Even if I’m not here, I want you to walk in and say, ‘This is very Harry.’”

Editors’ picks:

• In His Own Home, an Interior Stylist Takes a Light Touch

• Five Things On Our Radar This Week

• In This Edwardian Townhouse, the Bathrooms Set the Tone

Situated midway between Lake Garda and Lake Iseo, at the southern foot of the Italian alps, the city of Brescia is sleepy but handsomely built, its cobblestone lanes flanked by the occasional Roman ruin and a wealth of Renaissance-era palazzos. Among the most impressive of these is Palazzo Martinengo della Motella. Built in the Brescian Baroque style, its yellow-hued stone facade has large windows topped with dramatic pediments and a tall arched entryway carved with images of shields and of knights on horseback. The palazzo was constructed in the 15th century by its namesake family — “one of Brescia’s most aristocratic,” says the designer Paola Moretti, who in December 2020 was commissioned by an Italian art collector and her husband, the owner of a steel foundry, to reimagine the 5,000-square-foot second-floor apartment they’d recently purchased in the storied building.

Known as the piano nobile, a palazzo’s second floor is typically the most highly prized, and the most lavishly decorated. The Palazzo Martinengo della Motella’s is no exception. Over the centuries, generations of the family commissioned the region’s most sought-after artists to cover its walls with elaborate frescoes. In the 1700s, Pompeiian-style friezes of Greek legends and botanical motifs, attributed to the painter Giuseppe Teosa, were added to the primary bedroom and its anteroom. In the 19th century, the Brescian architect and painter Luigi Basiletti made a series of frescoes detailing the myth of Theseus in what is now the sitting room.

A culture of artistic patronage is still alive in Brescia, which is well known in Italy for its collectors. Though small — its population is less than 200,000 — the city is home to a large number of aristocratic families and industrialists with strong ties to the art world. When the Bulgarian-born artist Christo, who died in 2020, was looking for a place to stage his “Floating Piers” installation in 2016, the Brescia-based Beretta family, owners of the nearly 500-year-old arms company, offered up their private island in Lake Iseo as the landing point for his marigold-coloured bridge.

As a native Brescian, Moretti is no stranger to this worldly pool of clients. At the palazzo, she says, her greatest challenge was balancing the grand proportions and lavish wall decorations with her own minimalist style — not to mention the owners’ diverse collection of contemporary art. In the entranceway — which functions as a gallery space, with a concave mirrored work by the British Indian sculptor Anish Kapoor, a bronze head by the Italian artist Vanessa Beecroft and a cast bronze branch by the Israeli artist Ariel Schlesinger, among other pieces — Moretti skirted the walls with tall, reflective steel baseboards to coax the eye down from the sixteen-foot-high frescoed ceiling toward a tangled blue velvet Boa sofa by the Campana Brothers, a wooden Osvaldo Borsani sideboard and a vintage woven Tuareg mat. In the dining room, at the centre of the apartment, she used height to her advantage, hanging a nebulous Frank Gehry-designed Mamacloud pendant over a wooden AT-324 table by Hans Wegner and a set of glossy black Gio Ponti Superleggera chairs.

The apartment’s previous tenants, who had lived there for several decades, had lined the walls with wainscoting, treating the extravagant frescoes as if they simply were not there. And in the sitting room, a television blocked Basiletti’s most impressive and detailed imagery. In resuscitating the house, Moretti made minimal interventions to the existing architecture — “I tried to recuperate the original atmosphere,” she says — but in places where centuries-old elements had been destroyed, she took advantage of a clean slate. Some of the original Venetian terrazzo flooring, for example, had been removed and replaced with parquet, so she painted the reddish-toned wood pale grey, the outline of the herringbone pattern now just an apparition through the finish. In the bathrooms, she installed deep soaking tubs and monolithic wash basins in Tundra grey limestone, both of her own design, and used the same stone to fashion a round pedestal table for the kitchen.

With the sitting room no longer oriented around a television, Moretti was able to position the furniture — a 1949 Knoll living room set upholstered in pale pink and a trio of spindly, round-topped wooden Osvaldo Borsani coffee tables — away from the walls, allowing the room’s occupants ample space to appreciate Basiletti’s brightly rendered tableaus. She took a similar approach in the bedroom, designing a hollow mirrored closet that sits behind the iron four-poster bed, which is swathed in antique organza sari fabric hand embroidered with gold thread. Rather than covering Teosa’s dramatic scenes, the wardrobe reflects them on all sides. “It’s a journey,” says Moretti, “through the past, present and future.”

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