When Gabriel Hendifar, the artistic director of the New York-based design studio Apparatus, first set foot on the fourth floor of an unassuming Chelsea building in 2015, he knew he’d found his next headquarters. Behind a vaultlike copper door lay the high-ceilinged former studio of the painter Philip Taaffe; the space had previously been the gym of a boys’ high school. “It was one of those stepping-through-a-portal experiences in Manhattan,” Hendifar said, “where you open a door, and this whole universe unfolds. My own work is about creating universes that people can step into, so there was an immediate feeling of: We have to figure out how to make this happen.”
Hendifar, 41, and his team transformed the space into a lush showroom for Apparatus’s Modernist furniture and brass light fixtures, which the brand has produced since 2012, when Hendifar founded the company with his then partner in business and life, Jeremy Anderson. The mood they conjured was dramatic and seductive: tassel-shaped lamps dangling above plush carpets, marble tables alongside low velvet sofas. One collection was inspired by 1970s decadence, another by the visual language of the early 20th-century Austrian decorative arts collective the Wiener Werkstätte. Hendifar, who grew up in Los Angeles, has sometimes incorporated references to his Iranian heritage into the studio’s output, like a dining table whose shape resembles that of a Persian tombak drum. As the showroom’s three galleries shifted configurations each season to display the brand’s latest work, business operations hummed along in the back — half the floor was given over to offices, packaging and shipping and the artisans producing the pieces themselves.
By 2019, the company needed more room to breathe. Apparatus moved its production and distribution teams to a warehouse in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn, and Hendifar took the opportunity to reimagine what the Chelsea space could be: a “fully immersive world” for both his clients and his staff. Now, post-renovation, the entire floor exudes an unusual level of luxury and sensuality for a workplace. Walls are hung with Japanese screens from Hudson’s Naga Antiques depicting ornate birds and chrysanthemums. Pierre Frey floor pillows — a collaboration with Apparatus featuring fabric patterned in the style of khatam, a Persian marquetry technique — are set out for use in meeting areas. The office of the company’s president, Tara Carroll, features two drawings of cats in come-hither poses, “Eroticat No. 1” and “Eroticat No. 2,” which were made by Brenda Buck Riley, Apparatus’s in-house artist and photography editor.
The renovation also gave Hendifar the chance to “stitch some soul into what we do,” he said, by hosting events that embody the studio’s ethos of human connection. “We’re trying to create and support an emotional journey through our objects,” Hendifar said, “not just say, ‘Look at this thing we’ve made.’” In May of this year, Apparatus hosted the Baylor Project, a Grammy-nominated jazz duo, for three nights of concerts in the Chelsea headquarters, which was refashioned as a jazz club called Mums. (The room was decorated with thousands of peach-colored chrysanthemums.) The performances were so electric that the band released the live recordings as an album this fall.
Also in May, Hendifar launched a dinner series at the studio, Eight at Eight, which he hosts monthly in a mirrored dining room designed expressly for this purpose. He wanted to recreate the feeling of “going to your favorite department store after hours, and getting to feel what it’s like when no one else is around,” he said. The series was named for its basic structure — eight people dining at 8 p.m. — though the theme extends to the menu itself, which the chef, Lauren Gerrie, designs around eight in-season ingredients.
The latest installment took place on a recent September evening, with guests including the cabaret singer Justin Vivian Bond, the set designer Noemi Bonazzi, the dancer Vinson Fraley, the interior designer Darren Jett and Laurent Claquin, the president of the luxury group Kering Americas. Gerrie’s dishes focused on the farmers’ market bounty of late summer and early fall, including heirloom tomatoes, stone fruit, sweet corn and a safety orange pepper called habanada. “In the same way ramps are like, ‘Hello, spring!’” she said, “habanadas are like, ‘Hello, fall!’” Afterward, Hendifar and Gerrie shared tips for hosting a seasonal dinner that inspires true intimacy.
Prioritize Comfort
The gathering kicked off with Perseval-Farge champagne and cocktails in a lounge area that serves as the antechamber to Hendifar’s office. Hendifar, wearing a bright red Yves Saint Laurent top and a pair of black Khaite trousers, sprawled on the room’s leopard-print carpet by a stack of floor pillows. Guests snacked on Concord grapes and aged Gouda, with different varieties of each on separate tables to encourage mingling. Gerrie and Hendifar favor informal finger foods for appetizers to put guests at ease and avoid fussiness. “I try to think about things that don’t intimidate people or overwhelm them,” Gerrie said, “like a slightly different version of something that they might have already had.” At dinner, she served a chimichurri over Long Island cod that was both familiar and unexpected, the sauce’s traditional shallot and onion both absent to let the fresh herbs shine. (The dinner’s parsley, chives, lemongrass and lemon verbena all came from Gerrie’s own rooftop garden in SoHo.)
Delegate to Those You Trust
Hendifar says that the Eight for Eight dinners were built around the idea that Gerrie would be the chef. The two had been friends for about a decade and had worked together before for a few Apparatus events. Hendifar’s approach to this collaboration was straightforward: He told Gerrie what mood he wanted to create, then stepped back and let her work her magic. “There are very few people in my life that I trust enough to say, ‘Surprise me,’” Hendifar said. But he admired Gerrie’s ability to tell stories with ingredients: “It’s such an incredible experience to just let her do her thing.” Other portions of the evening were orchestrated by similarly reliable sources of good taste. Hendifar charged Carroll, also a guest at the dinner, with keeping the conversational energy flowing; topics ranged from gardening to “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” the director Laura Poitras’s recent documentary about the photographer Nan Goldin. Apparatus’s senior vice-president of creative, Andrew Cinnamon, who originated the Eight for Eight concept, helped develop the event’s look and feel and tasked the multitalented Buck Riley with the calligraphy for the invitations and the centerpiece of warm-toned chrysanthemums.
Embrace the Unusual
Gerrie’s menu showcased a number of surprising flavor combinations and hidden ingredients. A salad of Green Zebra, Striped Cavern and Sunray tomatoes was balanced by the richness of a vanilla bean dressing. A plate of Black Angus beef carpaccio, sourced from the SoHo butcher Pino’s, revealed a layer of black-cardamom-pickled plums below. At the end of the meal, Gerrie served a lemongrass-infused tea made with the cooking water from dense, flavorful Toyama Koshihikari rice, which had appeared in an earlier course. The savory beverage perfectly offset the brightness of a Charentais melon granita and lemon verbena pudding, which Gerrie finished with a drizzle of Agrumato Citron olive oil.
Engage All the Senses
When designing the studio’s dining room, Hendifar calibrated every detail, from the size and shape of the table to the heft of the Puiforcat flatware, to create what he called a “beautiful jewel box” that inspires connection within an otherwise lofty space. Low lighting glinted off amber Caskata glasses filled with a mineral white wine from Catalonia. A four-hour instrumental playlist was carefully constructed to guide the mood and energy of the evening. (The cinematic piano of a 1975 Sandro Brugnolini song was the soundtrack for the guests’ reverential enjoyment of the dessert course.) At the end of the meal, each attendee received a box of bespoke incense from Cinnamon Projects, a company founded by the S.V.P., with notes of iris, green tea and tobacco. In work and in hosting, Hendifar said he’s always looking for ways to activate all the senses and provide more of “the things that we’ve evolved as humans to be attracted to — because they feel good.”
Encourage Reflection
Apparatus’s dining room features smoky mirrored walls, as does the eating area in Hendifar’s home and his office at the studio. “As I’m designing a space,” Hendifar said, “I’m projecting into a fantasy of the experience that I want to have there.” As he sees it, mirrors allow Hendifar and his guests to see themselves having the imagined experience, to appreciate in real time the act of fulfilling their own desires. “For the first seven or eight years of a business, you’re just running on adrenaline: What’s next, what’s next, what’s next?” said Hendifar. “This whole project is about having a very intimate experience that’s reflected infinitely. It’s a manifestation of the need to be present in this moment.”
