INTERIORS I New York
A top-floor apartment within the historic American Thread Company Building, constructed in 1890 in the Neo-Renaissance style, could hardly accommodate a conventional interior scheme. To ensure a truly distinctive result, the owner entrusted the project to Romanian-born architect Crina Arghirescu Rogard.
The brief brought together two artists: American-Mexican painter Claudia Doring Baez and architect Crina Arghirescu Rogard, born in Romania, educated at the Politecnico di Milano, and professionally shaped in Paris at the renowned studio of Charles Zana. United by a long-standing passion for unconventional design objects, Baez identified Rogard as the ideal architect to reimagine her Tribeca residence in New York. Occupying the building’s top floor—once home to the Wool Club Ballroom, a historic meeting place for leaders of the textile industry—the apartment was completely reconfigured in just six weeks. The intervention unfolds as an eclectic yet coherent composition of artworks, textiles and bespoke contemporary design pieces, establishing a poetic dialogue between architecture, furniture and decorative objects. In navigating the relationship between old and new, the architect chose to preserve several original features, including a stained-glass skylight, neo-Renaissance columns, the mosaic flooring of the entrance hall, black walnut wall panelling, ornate ceiling mouldings and the generous fireplace in the living room. Equally central to the project was the owner’s remarkable art collection, featuring works by Pablo Picasso, Rose Wylie, Roy Oxlade, Robert Motherwell and Colt Hausmann, alongside paintings, sculptures and photographs by her mother Lucero Gonzales, her brother Adolfo Doring, and her daughter Alexandra Zelman.
Responding to this rich visual constellation, Crina Arghirescu Rogard introduced Rose Wylie’s large-scale diptych Dot and Detail into the living area, placed on the wall behind the dining table, its bold and unrestrained depiction of everyday life setting the tone for the space. As an allegory of dialogue, the architect positioned two chairs from Liz Collins’ “Conversation” series nearby, connected by a generous shawl-like textile element. The “Alligator” sofa by Italian designer Achille Salvagni acts as a sculptural divider between dining and living areas, chosen for its generous scale and fluid, anthropomorphic form. The dynamic atmosphere of the space is further enhanced by two contrasting armchairs—Fiorenza by Franco Albini and Lympho Contemporary by Taras Zheltyshev—alongside a modular coffee table composed of yellow cubes, freely reconfigurable in different arrangements. Within just six weeks, Crina Arghirescu Rogard succeeded in transforming Claudia Baez’s apartment into a poetic contemporary retreat—bold in expression, yet simultaneously warm and intimate.
Photography by Chris Mottalini
Words by Luminița Diculescu
Discover the full version of this story in Volume II.