a treat for jonny fans
HOUSE TOUR: COLDPLAY'S JONNY BUCKLAND AT HOME
Coldplay guitarist Jonny Buckland brings a touch of rock-and-roll spirit to his family's Manhattan loft, enlisting a young design firm that loves to paint it black.
In our collective fantasy, a British rocker's downtown Manhattan crash pad would be strewn with pricey vintage guitars, empty beer bottles, and a lithesome model or two. The smell of clove cigarettes (or something stronger) might hang in the air, an artfully defaced Union Jack tacked to the walls.
But reality is rarely as predictable. In fact, the New York pied-à-terre of Coldplay's lead guitarist, Jonny Buckland, is best described as clean, both literally and aesthetically. Elegantly minimal and flooded with light, it is an ode to dark neutrals, organic materials, and—has rock and roll really come to this?—wholesome family life. Like his bandmate Chris Martin, who is married to Gwyneth Paltrow, Buckland is thoroughly, happily domesticated. He and his jewelry-designer wife, Chloe, have two children, six-year-old Violet and two-year-old Jonah.
Their loft, in a 19th-century Romanesque Revival building on Astor Place, near the epicenter of Greenwich Village, is a home base for them when Buckland is working in the U.S. The couple spend most of their time in the tony Belsize Park area of London, but they come stateside several times a year, often staying in the apartment for a month or more. "We wanted it to be bright and happy for the kids and calming for us," says Chloe, who grew up in England but spent a great deal of her childhood in Jamaica, where her mother's family has lived for generations.
As a couple in their 30s, they knew they wanted to work with a design team that shared their young, urban sensibility. They chose Ashe + Leandro, founded by interior designer Ariel Ashe and architect Reinaldo Leandro. "It was very easy for us to channel their taste," says Ashe, who first made the musician's acquaintance in 2001, when she was an assistant designer at Saturday Night Live and Coldplay performed on the show. The two were reintroduced years later through friends. "We speak their language; we have the same references," Ashe says. The two young designers "got right away that we like things that are sort of masculine and full of right angles," adds Chloe.
The 2,100-square-foot two-bedroom apartment was disappointingly bland when the Bucklands bought it. Though the 11-story brick building has 13-foot-high ceilings and an imposing, landmarked facade with giant arched windows, virtually all of the historic details had been stripped from the inside spaces. The previous owners hewed to lackluster neutrals, and the doors and walls were standard contractor-issue. The kitchen, a focal point of the open-plan layout, was huge but generic.
Now, perhaps the most striking aspect of the radically updated space is the bold use of matte black, on floor-to-ceiling built-in shelves, a library ladder, a corridor of closets, the kitchen cabinets—even the outside of the claw-foot bathtub that has been installed in a newly created arch in the master bath.
The combination of the dark palette, white spaces, and liberal use of strong woods throughout makes the apartment feel both modern and timeless. The plain oak floors have been replaced with salvaged antique herringbone, stained dark and vibrating with character. The dining table is a thick, heavily grained wood slab, and the large kitchen island is mahogany butcher block (not hard to maintain, the designers promise, if you keep it well oiled). Because the windows are so large, there is never a chance of the effect seeming somber. Instead, the interiors perfectly marry the Bucklands' civilized London aesthetic with their love of downtown Manhattan's gritty history. On the wall of the living area hangs a tall drawing by Dave Muller of a collection of record-album spines, a nod to the fact that rock royalty is in residence.
"Neither the Bucklands nor we are much for safe, dull things," says Ashe, who recently completed the greenrooms for the new incarnation of Late Night with Seth Meyers. "We're not afraid of shades of black; black is our thing."
Chloe, who came into the project with a thick folder of photos she had torn out of magazines, is also a fiend for clean, straight lines. Perhaps the biggest conflict she had with Ashe and Leandro—they joke about it now—was their insistence that the kitchen backsplash, which runs up to the ceiling, be made of round white penny tiles. "I was pretty nervous, because I really am not that into round things," Chloe says, laughing. "But they were completely right."
Another priority was a playroom for the kids, not an easy-to-solve problem in a loft layout. So Leandro sliced off one end of the kitchen, enclosing it to make a cozy hideaway that also functions as a corridor to the children's room. It has French doors at either end and built-in cubbies for toys, with walls done in blackboard paint.
While there are a few pieces of classic modern furniture, including chairs by Roland Rainer and Eames, the designers avoided larding the space with pricey finds. "We weren't about to spend $60,000 on something," Ashe says. "They want a home that can be lived in, where their kids can be comfortable. They're not looking to impress anyone. They're the opposite of that. They're genuinely cool."
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Not sure that's EXACTLY what you had in mind LOL.
