The Grand Tour

Minimalism Gets a Colorful Spin in This Designer's Brooklyn Apartment

In Harry Nuriev's wonderland, pink plexiglass meets blue vinyl and it really, really works
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That chandelier overhead in Harry Nuriev's kitchen? It's made from 300-ish Bic pens that he carefully unscrewed, one by one, to remove the ink inside, leaving the clear cylindrical tubes and blue caps to dangle from a ring like crystals. A poster of late Russian singer Viktor Tsoi, who Harry says was "kind of a Patti Smith [and] symbol of my childhood," leans up against the wall behind (the original is by soviet painter Timur Novikov).Mikhail Loskutov

Where mere mortals see a plastic Bic pen, Harry Nuriev sees a chandelier. Where we see cut-to-size plexiglass in a shop on Canal Street, he sees home through a rose-colored window. The idea of a lazy Susan inspires not "Please pass the pepper, Grandma," but a spinning, gleaming steel bookshelf. That's because for Harry, a Moscow-born architect and furniture designer, making bracingly fresh decorative items is simply a fact of life—and one that he seems endlessly inspired to do, lucky for us. After debuting his first collection at New York Design Week two summers ago, the then-33-year-old moved to Brooklyn and got his business, Crosby Studios, off the ground. Then he went looking for a place to live, selecting an apartment many would overlook (three bedrooms in a circular configuration; a galley kitchen with cabinets that hid all the original prewar molding) and made it a temple to his work—if temples were the kinds of places that had low-slung, royal blue sofas with matching vinyl cushions. "I had a long pink period. . . ." says Harry, remnants of which are scattered throughout the apartment. "But now we’re in our blue phase, between Picasso and [Yves] Klein."

Harry's landlord asked him to leave this archway the way it was (built in to be a smaller opening and then outfitted with a standard door) to which Harry replied, "Don't worry," and opened it right up. Natural rugs, selected to match the wood floor, are always his preference: "I always have an issue with rugs. All the rugs are wrong for me. I spend 50 percent of the time finding the right rugs."

Mikhail Loskutov

Ever the design optimist, Harry considered himself "blessed with the layout—it’s pretty unusual," and set about making a series of renovations most renters would never dream of undertaking, even with their landlord's consent: restoring wide archways between rooms; taking down all the existing kitchen cabinetry and building out custom counters; and making, well, almost every piece of furniture. Here's how he did it.

Kitchen

"Of course it was a nightmare. It was the hardest part," says Harry of removing the apartment's original cabinets, oversize fridge, and full-size stove to make room for his own designs: twin cabinet-counters made of water-resistant MDF, powder coated in his signature blue. The sink is just ordinary stainless steel in the same color; the faucet he brought from Moscow.

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A cooktop (which Harry sourced from Best Buy) crowns the other counter, which is positioned in front of a window that opens into the dining room. Previously, the window had been boarded up with plywood and painted white (presumably to make the adjacent "bedroom" private), but Harry replaced it with a pane of pink plexiglas.

Mikhail Loskutov

Dining

Harry purchased the inexpensive pink plexi in a shop on Canal Street, and it ties together other pink accents throughout his home with the more blue rooms.

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Steel chairs of Harry's own design are scattered around a table he also fabricated—the base was originally a "low library" (that is, a bookshelf) that he repurposed by adding a slab of marble on top. The orange landscape, which one of his clients had planned to throw away, is a nod to his childhood, "a very common Russian decoration that you can find in any office or university."

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The blue-and-beige marble slab was "hard to find in New York, where stone is mostly red, green, white," he says. The slab he ultimately landed on was sourced from New Jersey.

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Sitting

Harry describes this corner as "like a small library," with a towering bookshelf and a chair of his design from the Sight Unseen show that brought him here. "I love how the two colors play with each other—the electric blue and this elegant, naked skin color," he says. "It was by accident, I didn’t know the two colors would work!"

Mikhail Loskutov

A sofa of powder-coated steel and vinyl cushions (made from vinyl he found in NYC's garden district) creates a tension between nostalgia and futurism that characterizes much of the home's design. "I think all the diners in the states have this bench?" he asks, but essentially states. White hand by Harry Allen.

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Above the sofa, another Russian piece of art that he thrifted from a store in Greenpoint. "The coffee table used to be a chair before, but nobody got it, so . . ." he says with a laugh. "My inspiration was Japanese architecture and engineering tricks. I like to play with some magic stuff, so when you look at the chairs, you think, 'Are they stable or not?' But they are, and they work well."

Photo: Mikhail Loskutov