Alejandra Alonso Rojas doesn’t thoughts getting her arms soiled. Actually, pop in on the New York–based mostly Spanish dressmaker one weekend and also you may simply discover her within the kitchen, arms deep in a pure dye bathtub, with strips of dipped materials hanging to dry.
“I dyed my complete 300-piece pre-fall assortment right here,” says the designer of the now on-sale items which combine slinky, dip-dyed silk slip attire along with her signature knits. It’s an eye-popping psychological picture contemplating her two-bedroom household residence in Nolita is slicked in an invigorating shade of pink she likens to the cascades of bougainvillea in her native Spain.
“I noticed this house as a clean canvas—a brand new starting,” the designer says of the house, which she moved into the summer time of 2020, after residing for a decade within the one-bedroom condominium the place she began her enterprise. She and her husband, Alejandro, had their son, Alonso, in 2019, and so they had been able to scale up. Within the thick of the pandemic, adorning a brand new residence little by little grew to become a much-needed artistic outlet for Rojas. “I actually needed to make one thing daring and colourful—I feel that’s what I wanted,” she explains. “I had this imaginative and prescient of a pink house.”
She didn’t rent an inside designer however sought assist in what felt like a extra crucial area—shade—bringing on Martin Kesselman, a shade strategist, to advise on her choices. To convey architectural unity to the hovering loft house, they determined to go for it with a vibrant pink, utilizing Farrow & Ball’s shape-shifting Lake Purple in an allover remedy throughout partitions, ceilings, cupboards, and moldings.
“Carrying the colour onto the ceiling and onto the skirtings and customarily utilizing extra of it truly makes it really feel much less daring than should you had a distinction in shade or a complimentary shade alongside it,” Kesselman explains. “The concept was to create one thing vibrant that additionally had a heat to it. We didn’t need it to be so daring that it was not livable.”
Alonso Rojas’s evaluate? “It’s very soothing,” says the designer, who set to work adorning, beginning with an artwork assortment she has slowly constructed over time. A diptyque she commissioned from artist-friend Philippine de Richemont (they’re collaborating on patterns for her spring/summer time 2023 assortment) hangs over the sofa. Lithographs by Gustav Klimt, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Spanish poet Rafael Alberti might be noticed all through. One among her personal printed jacquard materials that includes nude feminine silhouettes in pink—a scaled-up model of a watercolor—hangs like a portray within the combine.
The furnishings was a mixture of issues she’d had—the Eero Saarinen eating desk, Pierre Cardin for Roche Bobois chairs, and the curving couch she designed and upholstered in leftover shearling from an previous assortment—and new finds. She scored a cult-favorite Togo couch, which she recovered in a purple bouclé to pop towards the pink partitions. She commissioned a virtually matching cherry purple armchair from French designer Laura Gonzalez which pulls as much as a small desk. Some items from her final place discovered new functions, just like the 18th-century Japanese tea desk that after served as her son’s arts and crafts floor now sits in the lounge, endearingly up to date with traces of Alonso’s portray.
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This condominium was not solely a spot to play with shade, but additionally a brand new canvas for one thing else she’d been experimenting with: wallpaper and material design. “I’m a dressmaker, however I’m additionally a textile designer—I’m a colorist,” explains Rojas, who had created a wallpaper for her son’s room of their final condominium and needed to increase on that concept on this residence. Beginning along with her fall/winter 2020 assortment, Rojas had created floral patterns by painstakingly making use of rose petals, rose leaves, and eucalyptus leaves to silk. “I liked the colours and patterns a lot I had to make use of them in my residence,” she explains of the approach which she has translated into materials (used on the cushions of the window bench) and wallpapers, considered one of which envelops the first bed room. Right here, she and Kesselman created one other shade assertion, utilizing Farrow & Ball’s India Yellow on the ceiling—a praise to the wallpaper’s wealthy ochre floor.
In Alonso’s room, a horse-printed paper—derived from a watercolor she created for her 2019 assortment, when she was pregnant with him—covers the partitions. Since she knew the door to this child’s room would usually be left open, she needed to design it in a approach that may really feel on par, designwise, with the remainder of the home. Framed within the doorway are Knoll chairs, a West Elm desk, a Donald Judd–esque low-lying Montessori mattress, and lithographs by the Spanish poet Rafael Alberti.
“I feel that was the toughest room, however the one which I had essentially the most enjoyable with,” Alonso Rojas says. Alonso is happy. At any time when the household escapes from town, he has a typical chorus: “When are we going again to the pink home?”