ELLE DECOR

Mix Master
October 2005

In his Greenwich Village apartment, David Netto combines the rare with the relaxed, giving a new spin to glamour.

“My hope is that it reads as friendly modernism, full of character, and reflects just enough personal style to be a family home, not a manifesto,” says David Netto of his apartment in a 1920s Georgian brick building overlooking Manhattan’s Washington Square Park. Friendly modernism and family home? In the same space?

Were it not for the unerring eye, and insistence on a lived-in look of this interior and furniture designer, whose clientele is drawn from New York’s social elite, the impulse to put your feet up on his Yves Klein cocktail table might never arise. But Netto himself, with his classic profile and expertly tousled hair, mirrors his handsome surroundings. Indeed, Netto’s wife, Elizabeth, recalls the first time she set foot in the place. “I thought, Hmmm, too done up for me.” But as she spent more time in the 2,000-square-foot space, the documentary filmmaker, whose fifth-floor walk-up in Brooklyn was filled with found furniture, began to see how her prospective husband spent time in its rooms. “We never sat at the dining room table to eat,” she laughs. “David prefers sitting on the floor.” Sunday mornings found them sprawled out on the white sofas, swapping sections of The New York Times.

For two years after he bought the apartment, Netto essentially camped out in the tiniest room, which eventually became a bedroom for Kate, his four-year-old daughter with actress Ione Skye and the inspiration behind NettoCollection, his innovative line of modernist baby furniture and accessories. “I wanted to see how I lived in the space and how the light behaved,” he says. That’s when the big idea, as Netto refers to it, came to him: “I wanted the space to feel like the most beautiful suite on a 1930s French luxury liner.”

He turned to Susan O’Brien and Manuel Tan of Nasser Nakib, the architectural firm where Netto had worked before going out on his own, to transform the conventional apartment into a “white loft.” A gut renovation opened up the formal layout and highlighted the views of the park. “I never wanted to deny the Georgian shell,” he insists. “So you can see the building’s original divided windows from every vantage point.” But Netto wanted his Normandie, too, so he incorporated many vaguely nautical details. He paneled the entry walls and covered the bookcases in whit lacquer, and used polished-nickel hardware everywhere. The South American chestnut floor spans the apartment from the front door to the far windows in an uninterrupted stretch. “Think boat deck by Hermes,” Netto proposes.

The glossy free-form space is anchored along the starboard side by luxuriously appointed, if compact, private spaces. The sitting room, bedrooms, and bathrooms are highly colored and somewhat exotic, which is not surprising given Netto’s refusal to adhere to any one style. He does, however, insist on loads of allure. “Lots of glamour, especially in small rooms, is very important,” he says. Behind the zebrawood doors to the sitting room are a pair of French leather armchairs and a cocktail table from the 1920s, and an 18th-century Swedish drop-front secretary. “I wanted it to feel like a movie set,” he says. In one of his gutsier moves, he covered the walls of the master bedroom in a hand-blocked wallpaper mural by Zuber. “It has taken Elizabeth a while to get used to it,” Netto admits, “but I think it’s extremely cool.” It serves as the backdrop for a Jean-Michel Basquiat drawing and a Regency mechanical table, which the designer says, “I’m sure Kate will break soon.”

That didn’t stop him from placing a 1930s French chest, one of his favorite pieces and the inspiration behind the dresser in his nursery collection, next to her bed. That insistence on using and enjoying beautiful things, no matter how precious or pedestrian, is evident throughout. There’s the ebonized desk with its naked pony-skin top – glass would prevent your hands from feeling the seductive fur – and the Anglo Indian dining table that shows rings from neglected drinking glass or two. Books are piled in front of the bookcases, as if waiting to be shelved. But perhaps the best example of Netto’s refusal to indulge the rigidity of modernism or the haute provenance of his more important pieces is his nonchalance about the pigment-filled Yves Klein cocktail table, which required a special team clad in protective white suits to install. A dime-size chip doesn’t seem to bother him because, according to Netto, “The most elegant interiors are just slightly tatty.”