Inside Designer Robert Stilin’s Creative Red Hook Abode

Stilin first visited the unit three years ago at the suggestion of a friend who was buying in the building, a 1910 warehouse in Red Hook that had recently been converted into condominiums. After 14 years living in a cozy SoHo two-bedroom (AD, 2019), the designer was ready for a change. “I wanted more space, to live a bit more graciously,” he says. One step into the apartment and there was no resisting its scale and sweep: some 3,600 raw square feet, with those broad 13-foot-tall windows on two sides and a U-shaped layout primed for neatly divided public and private realms.

To make it all his own, Stilin embarked on an ambitious transformation, collaborating closely with architect Mark Gettys to carve out a generous primary suite and guest bedroom along one side of the loftlike plan, leaving the other wide open for the kitchen, living, and dining areas. Hand-contoured planks of white oak now cover the concrete slab, though the original columns remain untouched, a rugged note further accentuated by the addition of bespoke industrial-inspired steel doors to separate the sleeping quarters and powder room. Furnishings, meanwhile, pull from the designer and dealer’s vast repository of personal treasures, with new purchases folded into the ineffable mix. “What’s your scheme? I don’t have one,” muses Stilin, who enlisted his savvy son, Dylan, as a sounding board and project manager throughout the process. “Like any other home I’ve had, but to a much greater degree, this apartment has been a laboratory.”

Throwbacks to 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s France create a leitmotif, some of them unattributed (a lacquered-steel stool, a concrete table lamp) and others finely pedigreed like the Pierre Chapo dining table, Pierre Guariche desk chair, and Jean Prouvé shutter. Postwar Italy too offers a through line, whether in the case of the mirror, rosewood floating shelf, and Gino Sarfatti sconces that compose the makeshift entry, or the twin Franco Albini armchairs that face off in the living room. But pull on narrative threads and you’ll find ample exceptions to any rule, among them a subversive Campana Brothers lounge chair, witchy Rick Owens stools, and an otherworldly Misha Kahn cocktail table. “I am drawn to things that are beautiful,” Stilin notes, “but first and foremost things that are comfortable and functional.”