The In-Between
Downtown creates. Uptown curates.
I grew up between the two.
My father dealt art. My mother worked in fine jewelry. Uptown was the language of the house. Provenance, pedigree, the right names in the right rooms. I understood it. I just didn’t want to live in it.
My father had a foresight for talent before the world caught up to it. My mother had an instinct for beauty that led her straight to the source, the designers, the makers, the streets where it was all happening before it had a name. They were never as uptown as the apartment suggested.
I just took what they gave me and followed it somewhere they hadn’t quite gone. That place turned out to be the in-between. And I’ve never really left it.
Downtown was where I wanted to be. Not because I was rebelling, exactly, but because something there felt more honest. The artists who hadn’t been discovered yet. And actually, downtown wasn’t entirely foreign to me. My mother’s passion for fashion is what brought us there first.
Weekend brunches at Jerry’s on Spring Street, SoHo before it became what it is now, when the streets still had that particular rawness. Art vendors set up on the sidewalk, fashion that didn’t ask permission, a creative energy that felt almost accidental. I was absorbing all of it without knowing I was being shaped by it. The uptown girl with the downtown education, happening quietly, one Sunday at a time.
Those Sundays planted something. By the time I was old enough to find my own way downtown, I already knew exactly where I was going.
Uptown to downtown. Subway or taxi depending on the night, however I could get there. I was young, sneaking out, crossing the city like I was following something I couldn’t yet name. Donhill’s. Life. Hip hop was the pulse of every room, not background noise but the actual architecture of a night. You dressed for it. Belly out, low rise, that particular kind of effortless that was anything but. Rooms where artists and socialites existed in the same breath and nobody was performing for anyone. It felt more like home than anywhere I’d actually grown up.
I kept going back. Of course I did. And eventually those rooms knew me as well as I knew them. Which is how a downtown girl who grew up uptown ends up working the door at Lotus, Pangea, Suede. If you know, you know. You don’t apply for that job. You just become someone who belongs so completely that the role finds you.
And I was at the threshold. Deciding who came in and who didn’t. Looking back, that was its own kind of education. You learn to read a room before the room has even started. You develop an eye for what belongs together and what creates tension and what creates life.
That eye never went away. It just found a new room to work in.
Not long ago, a client came to me with a painting she’d found. She hadn’t commissioned it. Hadn’t been pointed to it by a dealer or a design magazine. She’d simply seen it and felt something she couldn’t fully explain, which is honestly the only way anyone should ever acquire art.
She asked me to assess it.
The artist was Jake Snowden. I looked at it and understood immediately what my client had responded to. There was a depth to it that resisted easy reading. It didn’t announce itself. It waited. That patience is rare. It’s the quality that separates work that photographs well from work that actually lives.
We hung it. And then beside it, a second piece, quieter and more atmospheric, intentionally smaller. Two works that spoke to each other without saying the same thing. The room found its tension. Its anchor. The thing that made everything else feel chosen rather than assembled.
When the project was complete, I had it photographed. It went to press. Jake Snowden’s work is now on those pages and there is more in the works!
That’s how it happens sometimes. A client’s instinct. A designer’s eye. And an artist who was simply making the work, waiting for the room that deserved it.
I think about my father when I’m standing in a client’s home assessing a piece. He had an extraordinary eye. But his world required legitimacy before it could see value. Mine works differently. I’m looking for the work before the world catches up to it, which means I’m often operating in the same in-between space I’ve always inhabited.
The uptown world taught me what excellence looks like when it’s been curated over centuries. The downtown world taught me to trust my eye before the consensus forms.
Interior design, at its best, is exactly that negotiation. Knowing the rules well enough to know which ones to quietly break. Giving wall space to artists who haven’t been handed it yet. Understanding that a room should feel like it was lived into, not installed.
I grew up between two worlds. I’m still there. And honestly, I think that’s the only place from which I could do this work.
