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"View Slideshow\n\nWhat to do with a New York loft? It's a postindustrial habitat that has tantalized urbanites for decades\u2014and not just with the promise of voluminous square footage. More than half a century after John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, and other mandarins of the avant-garde took up residence in these spartan downtown Manhattan dwellings, the prospect of following in their footsteps retains bohemian \u00E9lan and a frisson of creative ferment. Yet capacious and romantic as they may be, lofts present significant challenges for adaptation to the quotidian needs of sleeping, eating, storage, and so on. Acquiring a big space is one thing; figuring out how to live in it is quite another.\n\nInez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin understand the conundrum. The Dutch-born fashion photographers\u2014whose hyperstylized and audacious editorial images and artwork have been seen in magazines, galleries, and museums around the world\u2014purchased their first loft in a turn-of-the-century ice factory on New York's Lower East Side in 1996. Seven years later, with their son, Charles, on the way, they bought an adjacent loft, similarly configured, with a towering 17-foot-high living space, a portion of which was awkwardly divided by a mezzanine with seven-and-a-half-foot clearances above and below it. The couple spent the next three years trying to find an elegant and efficient way to consolidate the units.\n\n\"We played around with the idea of installing large doors between them,\" Van Lamsweerde recalls. \"We thought about Afghani doors and then glass doors, but the concept was a dead end. Basically the two apartments were banal white cubes with bamboo floors, and we wanted to make them into something coherent\u2014anything but another white cube.\"\n\nA compelling solution finally came into focus when the pair hired Simrel Achenbach of the Brooklyn design-build firm Descience Laboratories. A master woodworker and former assistant to painter Francesco Clemente, Achenbach is fluent in the lingua franca of the contemporary-art demimonde. He frequently collaborates with artists, gallery owners, and art-world-savvy architects such as Richard Gluckman and Bill Katz.\n\n\"Sim convinced us to abandon the door idea and simply make the loft as big and beautiful as possible,\" Matadin says. That meant demolishing the party wall to produce a 3,400-square-foot home divided into two long swaths of space: a soaring main area and a cloistered mezzanine level set above low-ceilinged public rooms.\n\nFollowing the couple's aesthetic touchstones\u2014including Truman Capote's Hamptons home, a Charlotte Perriand\u2013designed French ski chalet, and modernist 1970s wood-and-glass houses of The Ice Storm variety\u2014Achenbach transformed the apartment into a tapestry of fine millwork. The doors are oak, the kitchen cabinetry is bleached alder wood, and the floors of the mezzanine and below are wide-plank pine (these serve as a deliberate foil to the cool travertine underfoot in the spacious main living area). In deference to the quality of the timber on display, the designer laid down every board and adjusted its configuration prior to installation. Referring to a particularly lyrical arrangement of pine planks on the wall of a small sitting area off the dining room, he says, \"The knots have their own rhythm, like a John Cage composition.\"\n\nOnce the shell of the loft was resolved, Van Lamsweerde and Matadin brought in another designer with art-world ties, New York\u2013based Daniel Sachs, to help orchestrate furnishings and decorative objects. \"Inez and Vinoodh enjoy having beautiful and provocative art and objects around them,\" Sachs says. \"They constantly work with sets and props for photo shoots, so they had a strong idea of what they wanted.\" Here the goal was to create the impression that they had lived in the space since the '70s. \"On the surface, the concept can seem nostalgic,\" Sachs adds, \"but everything we used has a personal history, which makes the rooms very intimate and human.\" The eccentric assemblage includes tables by Yves Klein and John Dickinson, chairs by Perriand and Poul Kj\u00E6rholm, mirrors by Georges Jouve, massive hanging lamps by Isamu Noguchi, vintage Moroccan carpets, and curiosities such as a taxidermy fawn that Matadin gave to Van Lamsweerde one Christmas. To these Sachs added sympathetic pieces designed by himself and Achenbach, notably the living room's two facing sofas, leopard-skin rug bordered in red, white, and black felt, and kilim-covered central seating platform. \"The combination strikes a good note,\" Matadin says. \"Some of the elements are organic, and others are purely about glamour.\"\n\nThe couple's friendships and their adventures on the art scene can likewise be traced through the works on display. A drawing by Brice Marden, for example, was a gift from the artist on the occasion of their son's birth. A piece by Richard Phillips was based on one of their photographs. Gallery owner Andrea Rosen, who happens to be Achenbach's wife, gave them a Polaroid by Nobuyoshi Araki.\n\nThe exquisitely studied quality of Van Lamsweerde and Matadin's own images is also reflected in this adroit conversion from factory space to home: Every vignette feels like a still life, every object has a place. Says Van Lamsweerde, \"The apartment is like a group show. It's about our life together.\"\n\nClick here to see Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin's bohemian Manhattan loft."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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