Andrew Torrey has turned the front door of his New York apartment into a teleportation device, transporting visitors to another place and time whenever they pass by. At least that was his intention.
Mr. Torrey, an interior designer, grew up on a farm in rural Kansas, six miles from the nearest neighbors. It’s a setting he sorely misses and aims to recreate in his carefully decorated Sutton Place rental.
“I want to be surrounded on all sides by things I love,” Mr. Torrey said.
New York is nothing without its newcomers, and while the city embraces a multitude of traditions and cultures, many transplants—including a real-life cowboy like Mr. Torrey—still feel out of place.
To stay connected, some interior designers use their professional expertise to remind themselves of the places and people they grew up around. As a result, one can experience the Asian influences of Hawaii, the prairie west, Ukrainian art and European design without leaving the city.
A meadow in Sutton Place
When Mr. Torrey moved from West Chelsea to a 14th-floor condominium rental on Sutton Place, the place couldn’t have looked further from the farm he grew up on in Kansas.
His stylish one-bedroom gave no sign of his childhood showing of American Quarter Horses, a breed known for its ability to sprint short distances. But over time, he transformed the place into a western wonderland.
“I know you shouldn’t find joy in things, but I’ll think about how I felt when I was in my house as a little kid and it’s amazing to feel that now,” said Mr Torrey, 45, who owns the design firm Torrey.
A row of Lucchese Western boots await in the entryway, followed by a half-bath where four-and-a-half-foot steer horns hang over the mirror.
In the en-suite bedroom, two paintings of his grandmother and grandfather’s horses seen standing on the Kansas prairie hang above his bed.
The brash American cowboy lifestyle is a motif throughout the apartment – it comes from Kansas and elsewhere – starting with a high-waisted Marlboro lamp that stands next to a stool from Paul Newman’s desk, which Mr. Torrey bought from the Stair Galleries. an auction house in Hudson, New York. Mr. Torrey grew up watching the actor’s “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “Hombre” and other cowboy movies.
Mr Torrey’s collection of drawings by artist Robert Loughlin, depicting a man smoking, hangs on the walls.
The pièce de résistance, however, is a 6-by-6-foot shelf in the living room. Among the skillfully stacked art books and Time-Life Books’ “Old-West” series are treasures from his travels.
“I have a real aversion to decorative filler,” Mr. Torrey said, sitting in a deer-studded chair that came from the rustic New York office of his best friend’s grandfather. “This all means a lot to me.”
Several sculptures sit on the shelves, including a Benin Bronze he bought on his first trip to Morocco, that remind him of his grandparents’ sculpture collection. There are fossils and minerals and, here and there, sheaves of genuine wheat, its talisman.
Mr. Torrey said he spent $225,000 on the decor and that the theme throughout the apartment is his connection to the Earth and the elements.
“I have an appreciation for natural materials,” Mr. Torrey said. “My values, my respect for things and respect for people, reflect how I live my life.”
Support Ukraine from afar
When Artem Kropovinsky and Julia Kropovinska moved from Ukraine to Brooklyn in 2018, they left behind many of their practical everyday items. Instead, the three suitcases the couple carried mainly contained silverware, ceramics and photographs.
“Since we are so attuned to design and detail, it was very important to bring memorable things with us,” said Mr. Kropovinsky, 32, an interior designer and founder of the studio. Perspective. He often works with his wife, Julia, 33, a photographer and interior designer.
Among their piled items were elaborate centuries-old silver spoons, including one given to Mr. Kropovinski by his great-grandmother. Careful to preserve its patina, Mr. Kropovinski refuses to clean it. “I don’t want to unpick the memory,” he said.
The Kropovinskys have spent about $5,000 expanding their collection of Ukrainian decor since settling into their one-bedroom rental in a brick house in Bay Ridge. Some treasures, such as a ceramic bust of a Ukrainian woman wearing a headscarf, were found at the “I Am U Are — Ukrainian Creators Fair” held last year on the Lower East Side.
Supporting small businesses in Ukraine is a small comfort to the Kropovinskys, who cannot return home while it is at war.
On her computer at night, Ms. Kropovinska found ceramics, like a tabletop vase that looks like a poppy seed, a common plant in the home, from makers such as Gorn, Quiet form and Dasha Ptitsami in Ukraine. Images from the Crimea, where Mr. Kropovinsky was born, are scattered around the apartment in photographs and books.
On the refrigerator are mosaic magnets made of debris from destroyed buildings in Saltivka, a neighborhood in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv where the couple lived before moving to Brooklyn. Mr Kropovinsky ordered the magnets from Ukraine, where an architect sold them to raise money to buy portable heaters for households facing winter blackouts during the war.
Mrs. Kropovinska took a handmade 1930s linen tablecloth with matching napkins from one of her closets that she ordered from a company in western Ukraine.
“It’s a little piece of my home and it makes me so happy to have all these things around me in every corner,” she said.
A taste of Milan
Jonathan Fargion can visit Little Italy whenever he wants, but when asked if the midtown Manhattan neighborhood reminds him of home, he just laughed. It’s “very touristy,” he said. SoHo is more his style.
Mr. Fargion, 37, a landscape architect who owns Jonathan Fargion Design, moved from Milan to New York in 2012 to attend the New York Botanical Garden’s School of Professional Horticulture. But he was not allowed to return home for much longer than he had planned due to problems with his work visa followed by pandemic travel restrictions.
“It’s a very intense thing to go through,” he said of the blockade in America. “My dad was sick and I couldn’t go see him.”
To deal with his nostalgia, Mr. Fargion toured Italian design showrooms in SoHo. He filled his prewar rental in Washington Heights with tributes to his Jewish Italian heritage, starting with a handmade wooden mezuzah given to Mr. Fargion by his father, who lives in Israel.
Mr Fargion now travels about once a year to Milan, staying with his mother. She is an avid collector of art and antiques, having a 16th-century console among her furniture, she said.
Each time he goes, Mr. Fargion returns with more pieces: a collage by the Italian artist Lucio del Pezzo and a print of the cartoonish “Rattle-less Snake” by the Belgian artist Pierre Alechinsky.
“My family has always looked at art and beautiful things,” he said, adding that he has brought so many pieces back from his family in Italy that he has spent almost nothing on decorating.
There are several works around his apartment by the Italian artist Giuseppe Capogrossi, including a folding print he found in his mother’s cellar.
“Capogrossi represents the house,” he said. “If I go somewhere and see a Capogrossi, it looks like a hug to me.”
Mr. Fargion is particularly proud of his collection of lamps. The tallest of the group, the ‘Papillona’ floor lamp, another memento from his family’s apartment, was designed by Afra and Tobia Scarpa for Flos. It also has Oluce’s ‘Atollo’ glass table lamp in a living room window under a purple oxal canopy. Founded in 1945, Oluce is one of Italy’s oldest lighting designers.
“It’s my favorite at night because, the cool thing is, it lights up on the bottom, too,” she said of the little white lamp. “All the lights I have are like sculptures.”
Honolulu meets Bed-Stuy
It took Jarrett Yoshida and a former partner about 10 years to renovate the first floor of their 1930s Bedford-Stuyvesant townhouse. When they finished the project in 2015, after spending about $50,000, the only original features were a few doors, which they painted white.
In 2018, the couple listed their studio apartment on Airbnb and moved their belongings upstairs. They were named Super Host in their first year. (They ended their relationship in 2023.)
Mr. Yoshida, 56, grew up in Honolulu and moved to New York in 2002.
“When I think of my home, I think of it as an extension of my family,” said Mr. Yoshida, owner of Jarret Yoshida Interior Design in Brooklyn.
Walking into the 800 square foot studio is like perusing a restoration showroom. Most of the furniture is found and restored, following the methods Mr. Yoshida learned from his elders, he said.
“My grandparents grew up working in sugarcane fields,” he said. “When you don’t have money, you’re forced to look at everything like, ‘Can I keep this for the rest of my life?'”
Everything bespoke for the space was done with DIY creativity. In the kitchen, Mr. Yoshida crafted the glass backsplash with blown-up photos of koi fish he took in Hawaii. To make it, he printed the photos on the back of the glass and hired glaziers to install it.
A tapa cloth, a gift from Mr. Yoshida’s high school friend, hangs in the dining room. The fabric, formerly the property of the island’s Bishop Museum, hangs by a silk thread from the cornice molding, a technique Mr. Yoshida learned while working at the Smithsonian Museum.
The epithet, however, is Mr. Yoshida’s imported Japanese screen, made sometime around 1868 during the Meiji Restoration, a political revolution in which Japan embraced Westernization.
It was around this time that both sides of Mr. Yoshida’s family left Japan for Hawaii.
Asked if he’s nervous that Airbnb guests might damage the precious artifact, Mr. Yoshida shrugged and said he plans to restore it anyway — a project he estimates will cost about $20,000.
“Even if you don’t understand anything about art,” he said of the display, which cost $3,000, “you know when you see it that this is kind of amazing.”
