Apartment Envy: Grown-Ups in Toyland
2,500-feet DUMBO loft, wood floors, 14-foot ceilings, rent under $2,500
VALERIE REISS
12/18/2000
Barbara Collins’s and Michael Whitney’s inner children have plenty of room to play. Their 2,500-square-foot DUMBO loft is part art gallery, part funhouse, part interior designer’s dream. “I just love to make stuff,” says Michael, an artist/carpenter/designer who specializes in making furniture and functional art objects from discarded junk. But rather than amateurish art, his pieces are modern, impeccably detailed and infused with humor. For example, the front hallway’s ten-by-four-foot American flag has a functioning clock on each of the 50 stars. His five-foot-high working kaleidoscope, which took two months to build, has 35 removable disks created by 15 local artists. The “sewing chair” has its wood-splits boldly stitched together with twine. A “paranoid chair” has a sideview mirror attached to each arm. And a stool with an antique bathroom scale as its seat amuses men and horrifies women. There are tables made from doors, but not the usual toss-the-door on the cinderblock variety. These are carefully rebuilt and folded to form three sides—the top, plus two legs—with the knob sticking wittily out one side. Barbara and Michael ask guests to guess the original life of a pair of modern, curvy lamp bases. They’re washing machine agitators Michael picked up for less than a dollar.
If Michael is the inventor of the pair, Barbara is the harmonizer of the big picture. After moving from Connecticut to attend Pratt six years ago, Michael shared the loft with two male roommates. When Barbara, a designer and fabric specialist at ABC Carpet and Home, moved in last spring, she had the task of de-bachelorizing the space. Though she adores his art, she pulled everything together and made it home. “He builds and creates, I stylize… He’s my honeydew: ‘honey do this, honey do that,'” she laughs.
Barbara and Michael met while collaborating over design ³ she wanted to make a room screen and someone at ABC suggested calling Michael, a problem solver who worked with their visual department. After months of tossing around design ideas and flirting in the name of junk-hunting, they finally got around to the screen. This constant play/collaboration is still a major theme in their relationship. “When we’re not working, we’re working on the house,” says Barbara. They lugged one of the many ³ and heavy ³ antique doors that line a hallway from South Carolina. Another, they schlepped from Montreal. A peek into the “garage” ³ Michael’s studio ³ reveals projects past and present: shelves of lamps-to-be, umbrella chandeliers and phone book mirrors. “Just say it ³ it’s okay,” Michael grins, “we’re nuts.”
In addition to being a FIT graduate and a former flight attendant, Barbara is a pack rat extraordinaire. Her “playroom/guest room” is lined with Ikea cubby shelves—the only furniture in the loft that hasn’t been “brought back to life” (as Barbara likes to say of their recycled objects). These hold her collections, which include everything from 70’s sunglasses to antique silver vessels that belonged to her grandmother to a bottle of original Farrah Fawcett shampoo. The antique wrought-iron guest bed was hers to play with as a girl in upstate New York. Her family owned a former cigar factory where decades of junk was stored—a “big dollhouse” for her to play in. “People are freaked to stay in that bed. They say, ‘I can’t sleep with a mannequin staring at me,'” Barbara says, gesturing to a life-sized mannequin and a pair of legs in the corner. “But those were my Barbies when I was younger. That’s what I played with and made clothing for.”
With such wild digs, it’s no wonder they also use the space to sell art—deliberately and by chance. They have a mini “shop” of functional art for visitors that includes Michael’s fan-blade clocks, a chair made from an old refrigerator and a lamp fashioned from TV antennae. But even entertaining guests leads to business: Sandra Bernhardt recently bought several of their collaborative pieces after her designer, Robert Verdi, spotted them in the bedroom. And Michael’s barstools with red kickballs for seats sell briskly. “People come over and are like, do you live here?” says Barbara.
Live there, they do—and with flair. They open their house for events like the DUMBO Arts Festival and throw theme parties. For the last one, they rolled out Barbara’s collection of funky clothes and wigs and had a “big-kid dress up party” and fashion shoot.
Her antiques meet his retro-made-modern designs, and both bubble over with a shared sense of fun. The result is a space that combines high-minded design with earthy sensibility and downright silliness. A beautiful enamel panel hanging in Michael’s office—near his sleek Mac G4 Cube—has clocks showing the time in several different countries. Look closer and you see that each clock was a burner, the whole panel a range from an antique stove. “Using your imagination,” says Barbara, “lets you challenge yourself to not look at things the same way.”