When a client in Manhattan asks me for an art advisor, what they usually mean is this: I have an apartment I care about, a designer I trust, walls that are still empty, and no interest in spending my weekends walking galleries in Chelsea. That is the job. I take the search off your hands, I bring back only what fits, and I stay until the last piece is on the wall.

I have spent 14 years in the art world: curatorial work in museums, managing a gallery in Tel Aviv, and building art collections for hotels such as the Waldorf Astoria Chengdu and the St. Regis Amman. An apartment is smaller than a hotel. The standard is not.

What I do with the apartment itself

I start in the rooms, not in a catalog. A Tribeca loft with tall walls and cast iron columns asks for a different scale than a prewar Upper East Side apartment with plaster moldings and rooms that were drawn with pictures in mind. A glass tower in Hudson Yards has very little solid wall and a great deal of light, so the question becomes where the eye rests and what can hold its own next to the view.

Three things I check on the first visit:

• The light. Where it comes from, how it moves through the day, and where glare will ruin a glossy surface. This decides medium, finish and glazing as much as it decides placement.
• The building. Most Manhattan buildings have rules for installers: certificates of insurance, service elevator bookings, working hours. I plan the installation around them, so nothing arrives that cannot get upstairs.
• The sightlines. What you see from the front door, from the sofa, from the dining table. The most important wall is rarely the biggest one.

What I do with your designer

I work alongside architects and interior designers, not around them. If your designer is already on the project, I read their drawings, their palette and their furniture plan before I propose a single work. Art that ignores the design reads as an afterthought. Art that only matches the design reads as decoration. The right piece does a third thing: it belongs to the room and still says something the room could not say on its own.

In practice this means I join early when I can, while lighting and wall finishes are still open, so that a picture light lands where the picture will be. If the apartment is already finished, I work with what is there. Either way, the designer keeps the room. I bring the art.

A custom bar in a Manhattan skyline residence

The client loved to entertain, and the apartment had a custom bar built for exactly that. The bar needed one work to anchor it. I selected a large format digital collage that draws on the visual language of glamorous social gatherings and references "Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère", painted by Édouard Manet in 1882.

The reference is not an inside joke for art historians. Manet's barmaid is one of the great paintings about looking and being looked at, and that is what a bar in a home is for. Guests see the work and recognize something in it, even when they cannot say what. Art is not an accessory. It is a meeting point between a person and a space, and this is what that looks like. The piece is not there because it matched the stools. It is there because it says who the client is when the door opens.

How the work is structured

Seven steps, the same for a single wall or a whole apartment: discovery, research, curatorial development, budget planning, art procurement and selection, logistics, installation. You see a shortlist, not a flood. I assess market value and negotiate on your behalf, and because many works come through direct relationships with the artists, the cost of the art itself is often lower than the price on a gallery wall.

On fees: art advisors in the industry typically charge by the hour, a flat project fee, or a percentage of acquisitions. I quote each project after a first conversation, based on scope.

How to start

Send me one photo of the wall and a line about the room, at Stav@stavtheodor.com or through the contact form. If you are building a house rather than finishing an apartment, read when art should come into a new build. If you want to know what hotel and residence work taught me about scale and deadlines, read about art for hotels and hospitality.