Interiors We Love celebrates spaces where architecture, craft, and emotion converge. The series spotlights interiors defined by material intelligence and enduring beauty; spaces that move beyond trends, shaping everyday rituals and reflecting the evolving language of contemporary architecture worldwide.
In New York, The New Affiliates renovate a Williamsburg loft upon an existing palette of brick, wood, and plaster through a series of precise architectural interventions. A curtain-defined sleeping area, luminous bathroom, and sculptural veneered millwork core introduce flexibility and privacy, while maintaining the openness, material richness, and industrial character of the existing apartment.
The project preserves the spatial openness and atmospheric qualities of the original apartment, where exposed brick, aged timber surfaces, and weathered plaster establish a richly textured environment reminiscent of historic Venetian interiors. The intervention focuses on a limited number of highly detailed architectural gestures that generate a renewed spatial identity while maintaining the character of the existing shell.
A flexible sleeping area is defined by a sound- and light-mitigating curtain, allowing privacy without compromising the continuity of the open plan.
The newly introduced bathroom incorporates a clerestory window and an oversized tile grid, strategies that amplify light and visually expand the compact footprint. At the center of the project, a large millwork volume integrates the kitchen, dressing area, closets, storage, and appliances into a singular architectural element. Clad in veneered panels that are intentionally offset, misaligned, and stitched together, the structure operates simultaneously as furniture, partition, and spatial device.
Through a single sculptural gesture, it directs circulation, frames perspectives, and selectively obscures views across the apartment.
Refinished floors and a new ceiling articulated with patterned conduit further reinforce the renewed material dialogue, shifting attention away from the building’s infrastructure and toward the carefully curated relationship between existing textures and newly introduced surfaces.
Ultimately, the renovation proposes a restrained yet highly expressive approach to contemporary domestic architecture, where the atmosphere is shaped not through excess, but through precision, material continuity, and carefully choreographed spatial relationships.
By balancing preservation with selective intervention, the project establishes a quiet dialogue between the apartment’s industrial past and its renewed domestic identity, transforming the loft into a layered environment defined by tactility, openness, and spatial ambiguity.
Facts & Credits
Project title: Williamsburg Loft
Project type: Interiors | Apartment design
Architecture: New Affiliates Architecture -Ivi Diamantopoulou + Jaffer Kolb-
General Contractor: Darren Kraft, Kraftwork
Millwork: Studio Kina
Photography: Michael Vahrenwald/Esto