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Stepping into Adam Charlap Hyman’s one-bedroom apartment in a prewar tower in midtown Manhattan is like passing through the looking glass. In less than a decade the designer, one half of AD100 firm Charlap Hyman & Herrero, has established a reputation for spaces that exude fantasy rooted in research, that are whimsical, often off kilter, and always rigorously executed. The modest 800-square-foot space he calls home encompasses both a miniature library worthy of the 18th-century writer-aesthete Horace Walpole and a kitchen out of postmodern Italy, while elsewhere we find ourselves suspended between Baroque France and 1970s Germany. It all hums with vitality. “The space is alive for me,” says the designer.
A balancing act of eras and styles, the apartment exudes the sophisticated vision of someone twice Charlap Hyman’s 31 years. Take, for example, the living room, where a 17th-century Aubusson tapestry inherited from his Spanish grandmother dominates one wall, delightfully at odds with the more contemporary objects in the room. Lightening the mood, a group of polyester pom-poms from a dollar store perches atop a pristine 1972 modular sofa by Klaus Uredat. The combination is boisterous and bold. “Everything that gets put in front of that tapestry looks amazing,” says Charlap Hyman. “It has such an atmospheric effect.”
Equally expressive is his enchanted forest of a bedroom, where a lush Madeleine Castaing carpet decorated with berries and leaves cushions every step. A compact bed draped in a striped cover with matching bolsters is tucked into a niche with a unique Katie Stout headboard looming above it. The sculpture twists and winds furiously, weaving together many of Charlap Hyman’s favorite things—and creatures. “We were thinking of the amazing headboard Alexander Calder made for Peggy Guggenheim,” says Charlap Hyman. “Katie came up with this wonderful design with a fruit lady surrounded by flowers, glass and ceramic snails and mushrooms, and some actual shells welded onto the bronze.”
A Victorian majolica pedestal in appropriately woodland tones with a 1970s Art Nouveau revival lamp set on top and a dramatically scaled Mario Ceroli chair with an all-seeing-eye painting by Charlap Hyman’s mother, Pilar Almon, hanging above it complete the fantasy. Just beyond lies the grotto-like bath, clad in light gray terrazzo tile from Ann Sacks. A glass shell sconce lights the alcoved sink and cabinet, topped with a sponge almost too large to handle. A 19th-century Piranesi print is perfectly placed for bath-time contemplation.
Elsewhere in the apartment, Charlap Hyman’s sense of humor can be seen in the oversized play-dough vase by Bruce High Quality Foundation placed atop an Aesthetic Movement side table as if it were salvaged from a Roman ruin. The vase is just one of many elegant oddities Charlap Hyman has collected or created over the years. Other curiosities include a palm-wood architectural model with inlaid camel bone and minarets of shell that the designer picked up in Morocco, an 18th-century armchair upholstered in a repurposed Art Deco German shawl (“I’m very much on a Weimar design train!”), and a Nicola L Eye Lamp, which was Charlap Hyman’s first major design purchase.
Adjacent to these living room gems is a nook carved out for research and reading. Charlap Hyman designed a sculptural screen for its fireplace. Keeping it company is an antique glass-fronted bookcase built into the wall and comfortably low Aesthetic Movement chairs upholstered in a geometric Décors Barbares fabric. Here, and throughout the apartment, the objects on display embody Charlap Hyman’s relationships with family and friends. Sentimentality pervades a pointillist painting depicting an Upper East Side funeral home by friend Cynthia Talmadge, a spinal side table by former RISD classmate Misha Kahn, a copper sculpture of strawberries by his aunt Carmen Almon, and a portrait by his father, David Hyman, hanging on wallpaper Charlap Hyman & Herrero made in collaboration with his mother for Schumacher.
Of the personal mix, “there is this Spanish term I have been thinking about in connection to interiors—duende—the idea of something having soul,” the designer says. “If something has duende, it’s communicating an existential sense of loss and pain in a really beautiful way.” Indeed, in its mix of objects made with love just this year or in centuries prior, by an intimate or a stranger, for function or for fun, the apartment exudes soulfulness. The sum is a song that whispers and shouts at unexpected intervals, pulling in the audience with its wit, melancholy, and exuberance.
