Alejandra Alonso Rojas does not thoughts getting her arms soiled. The truth is, pop in on the New York–based mostly Spanish clothier 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 clothes along with her signature knits. It is an eye-popping psychological picture contemplating her two-bedroom household house in Nolita is slicked in an invigorating shade of pink she likesns 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 season of 2020, after dwelling for a decade within the one-bedroom house the place she began her enterprise. She and her husband, Alejandro, had their son, Alonso, in 2019, and so they have been able to scale up. Within the thick of the pandemic, adorning a brand new house little by little grew to become a much-needed artistic outlet for Rojas. “I actually needed to make one thing daring and colourful—I believe that is what I wanted,” she explains. “I had this imaginative and prescient of a pink house.”
She did not rent an inside designer however sought assist in what felt like a extra vital area—shade—bringing on Martin Kesselman, a shade strategist, to advise on her picks. To carry architectural unity to the hovering loft house, they determined to go for it with a vibrant pink, utilizing Farrow & Ball’s shape-shifting Lake Pink 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 really makes it really feel much less daring than for those who 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 did not need it to be so daring that it was not livable.”
Alonso Rojas’s evaluation? “It is 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 season 2023 assortment) hangs over the sofa. Lithographs by Gustav Klimt, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Spanish poet Rafael Alberti may be noticed all through. One in every 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 previous assortment—and new finds. She scored a cult-favorite Togo couch, which she recovered in a crimson bouclé to pop in opposition to the pink partitions. She commissioned a virtually 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 when 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 house 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 am a clothier, however I am additionally a textile designer—I am a colorist,” explains Rojas, who had created a wallpaper for her son’s room of their final house and needed 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 method 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 ocher 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 typically be left open, she needed 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 believe that was the toughest room, however the one which I had essentially the most enjoyable with,” Alonso Rojas says. Alonso is happy. Each time the household escapes from the town, he has a typical chorus: “When are we going again to the pink home?”