Alejandra Alonso Rojas doesn’t thoughts getting her palms soiled. Actually, pop in on the New York–primarily based Spanish designer one weekend and also you may simply discover her within the kitchen, arms deep in a pure dye tub, with strips of dipped materials hanging to dry.
“I dyed my whole 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 house in Nolita is slicked in an invigorating shade of pink she likens to the cascades of bougainvillea in her native Spain.
“I noticed this area as a clean canvas—a brand new starting,” the designer says of the house, which she moved into the summer time of 2020, after dwelling 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, they usually have been able to scale up. Within the thick of the pandemic, adorning a brand new house little by little turned a much-needed artistic outlet for Rojas. “I actually wished 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 area.”
She didn’t rent an inside designer however sought assist in what felt like a extra crucial area—coloration—bringing on Martin Kesselman, a coloration strategist, to advise on her alternatives. To deliver architectural unity to the hovering loft area, they determined to go for it with a vibrant pink, utilizing Farrow & Ball’s shape-shifting Lake Crimson 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 for those who had a distinction in coloration or a complimentary coloration 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 overview? “It’s very soothing,” says the designer, who set to work adorning, beginning with an artwork assortment she has slowly constructed through the years. 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 may be noticed all through. Certainly one of 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 outdated assortment—and new finds. She scored a cult-favorite Togo couch, which she recovered in a crimson bouclé to pop towards the pink partitions. She commissioned an almost matching cherry crimson 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.
Purchase now for limitless entry and the entire advantages that solely members get to expertise.
This condominium was not solely a spot to play with coloration, but additionally a brand new canvas for one thing else she’d been experimenting with: wallpaper and cloth design. “I’m a designer, 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 wished to develop on that concept on this house. 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 cherished the colours and patterns a lot I had to make use of them in my house,” she explains of the approach which she has translated into materials (used on the cushions of the window bench) and wallpapers, certainly one of which envelops the first bed room. Right here, she and Kesselman created one other coloration 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 wished to design it in a manner that might 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 probably the most enjoyable with,” Alonso Rojas says. Alonso is happy. Each time the household escapes from the town, he has a standard chorus: “When are we going again to the pink home?”
