Outfitting a SoHo Apartment as a Vintage Furniture Showroom
Vintage furniture is addictive, sometimes dangerously so. To unload his own cache—from Charlotte Perriand‘s Bauche dining chairs to a wrought-iron Tommi Parzinger floor lamp—Manhattan interior designer Neal Beckstedt quietly launched a 1stdibs.com digital storefront, which stocked key pieces from his installation at this year’s Kips Bay Decorator Show House. Encouraged, he decided to try again, at the much larger scale of a four-bedroom model apartment in SoHo’s XOCO 325 by DDG.
“It’s a pop-up,” Beckstedt says. “I brought clients here yesterday.” Public spaces showcase his signature restraint with architecture, thanks to a unifying coat of soft white paint. BDDW loaned the dining table, while Beckstedt reprised his alluring curved Kips Bay sofa design, complete with its thatch of thick fringe. He installed decorative lighting from Apparatus, then accessorized with a sculptural Gerrit Rietveld Zig Zag chair and a “sonambient sculpture” in the style of Harry Bertoia.
The living room’s rustic Perriand occasional table quickly sold—Beckstedt is currently pulling something similar out of his inventory—but essentially everything is up for grabs à la carte. Or Beckstedt explains that he can make decorating a breeze for the apartment’s eventual buyer, throwing in all the furnishings—soup to nuts—for a small extra cost.
