A finished house, with nothing on the walls

The house was complete when I came in: white walls, wide plank oak floors, a beamed ceiling, black framed glass doors opening onto trees and snow. Every finish had been decided and every finish was right. What it did not yet have was a point of view, and that is the one thing you cannot order from a builder.

The problem with new construction

A new build is coherent by design, and coherence can read as quiet, even anonymous, until art gives the rooms someone to belong to. The brief was to bring depth to the interior design and raise the architectural character of the house, not to decorate it. The collection was to include works by Jewish and Israeli artists alongside other contemporary voices, and the two had to read as one collection with one sensibility, never as a category and its exceptions.

Room by room

I built the collection with leading New York City galleries, planning the whole house before the first purchase. In the dining room, three small paintings in blues, pinks and violets hang in a row above the oak table, close in scale and palette, so the wall reads as one gesture under the two black pendants. In the office, a single large canvas in greens and yellows carries the room by itself, opposite the desk. In the hall, a large framed work in gold and violet sits above a bench and a bonsai at the foot of the stair, where everyone passes it several times a day. Each work was chosen for its wall, and each wall for what it could hold.

The result transforms a well designed house into a space with soul, where art and architecture speak the same language.

What I managed

Viewings and shortlists with the galleries, negotiation, shipping. Framing where a work needed it, then installation, with every piece hung at the height and spacing its room asked for. I handle this end to end on every project, from the first plan to the last hook, and I consider it finished only when the clients walk through and the house feels like theirs.

If you are building or finishing a home in Bergen County or New York and want the art planned with the same care as the architecture, write to me at Stav@stavtheodor.com or use the contact form. Read when art should come into a new build, or see a single work chosen for a Manhattan apartment.