The Brooklyn Museum has a warehouse, and inside of that warehouse is one of the nicest apartments in New York City. It's vacant, but you can't rent or purchase it. You can't even see it with your own eyes. We tried.
Recently, a website called Docomomo pulled the curtain back on this postmodern gem, which is really a set of rooms designed by then-rising architect star Michael Graves, between 1979 and 1981. They were created as a bedroom, playroom, and library for Susan and John Reinhold’s apartment, located at 101 Central Park West. They are now under lock and key in, presumably, Brooklyn.
Were these model rooms, you may be wondering? No. Apparently some rich people build rooms inside their existing rooms, or something. They were dismantled when the Reinholds moved, and donated to the Museum in 1986. They have never been on display. Anyway, here's what Graves did:
Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum
Part of a larger duplex, the suite consists of a library and child’s bedroom. Built-in bookshelves, wall paneling, and multi-tiered ceilings define the rooms, forming a completely designed, cohesive interior recalling French boiserie in concept. The suite exemplifies Graves’ signature style of muted colors and abstracted classicism.
The Reinhold rooms are important as rare examples of postmodernist interior architecture; as a work by the recently deceased Michael Graves (1934-2015). While many important modernist residential interiors still exist in houses, few modernist apartment interiors survive, and the Reinhold rooms may be the only postmodernist ones.
The Reinholds—also members of the art world—were friends with Andy Warhol, who thought the process shouldn't have taken Graves so long. He wrote in his published diaries:
The rest of the apartment was designed by a number of other architects, including A.M. Stern, who once had a great silver-lining comment on NYC apartments:
"Buy a city apartment and you are probably buying a box. But you can make a totally personal world inside that space. The only place this world has to touch what's really outside is at windows, doors, places where structural elements have to stay where they are.”
And we can all relate to that, even those of us who only have 90-square-feet to work with.
We reached out to the Brooklyn Museum to find out if they'll ever put Graves's work on display, and we'll update here if we hear back. [Docomomo via Curbed]
