Interior designer Ophelia Weiss and her financier
husband, Adam,possess what some might call a sixth sense when it comes to collecting art. Frequent patrons of such cutting-edge fairs as Art Basel, they’ve been collecting and following both up-and-coming and established artists and photographers for years, including the rising L.A.-based artist Daniel Wheeler, who creates liquid landscapes by snapping photos from the bottoms of Southern California pools, and the now practically ubiquitous Ryan McGinley.
But when the bicoastal couple came across two massive abstract works by Walead Beshty, a London-born, L.A.-based photographer, their timing was impeccable. “We had a feeling he was on a good trajectory,” Ophelia Weiss says. “And next thing you know, less than six months after we bought a piece of his, MoMA featured his work in an installation and he really took off!”
The Weisses, who are both from Los Angeles but spend much of their time in New York, aren’t the types to amass important works and then preciously stash them away in some remote storage facility. “We want to buy art that we can hang and live with,” says the designer, who faced a considerable challenge once it actually came time to install said art in her three-level renovated loft in SoHo. Even though it’s located in the epicenter of the New York art world, the apartment doesn’t even remotely resemble a typical SoHo gallery space.
“The only white walls we have are the transitional walls from one room to the next,” says Weiss, who perfected her skills at the New York School of Interior Design. “SoHo is such an urban setting, and I didn’t want the standard redbrick, white-walled downtown loft. I used a more lush color palette because I wanted to bring a pastoral element into an otherwise citified environment.” Indeed, much of the three-bedroom, three-bathroom loft is painted a soothing periwinkle, though it’s amped up by graphic punches of bold fabrics and wallpaper. “We went a little wild with the wallpaper,” admits Weiss, who found it doubly challenging to incorporate colorful art into a color-filled space—especially since she embraces an “art first” philosophy.
“A lot of designers work ‘decorator art’ into their room schemes,” she says, “but my husband and I like to collect art first and then hopefully find a home for it. It becomes a puzzle, fitting what we love into our daily life and figuring out the best way to live with it every day.”
The pieces by Beshty, for instance, were problematic from the beginning. “We thought, Where are we going to put these, with all the pinks and the purples in them?” recalls Weiss. “It’s not even our color palette!” But she found that they worked best hung low and nearly touching each other, providing brilliant contrast above a “dining room” table cleverly fashioned from two Warren Platner table bases and a large piece of glass.
Adding further glittery appeal in the adjacent kitchen is a row of custom-mirrored cabinets that face the living area. These serve as a sleek dividing line between the kitchen and living spaces while deftly reflecting Weiss’s painterly palette. “With a loft space, obviously you’re working with an open floor plan, but I wanted to have a transition point,” she says. “It’s sort of my ‘white wall.’ I love how you can express what you’re feeling through both the way you design a room or where you position a piece of art. It helps explain who and what you are, and what you want to be.”
click for a gellery view of images of Ophelia Weiss’ art-filled soho loft!
