People thought we would move back downtown,” Christine Gachot says, sitting in the living room of the Sutton Place apartment she and her husband, John, share with their two sons, Boris and Jack, and Slim, their springer spaniel. After all, for 18 years, they had lived in a loft on Bond Street, until they outgrew it during the pandemic and did something that probably only two designers (they are co-principals of Gachot Studios) would think to do: “We took this little moment to live in the Paul Rudolph museum,” Christine says about having rented the architect’s disco-modernist triplex penthouse cantilevered atop an 1867 brownstone at 23 Beekman Place. It’s not actually a museum — if you want that, go to the Metropolitan Museum exhibition on the architect through March 16 — but it’s a work of art as much as an apartment: There are endless stairways and almost no walls. However, with a working fireplace and terraces overlooking the East River, it was a great place to throw a party. Back in Rudolph’s day, his bathroom had a glass-bottom tub that could be viewed from the floor below; Christine and John used it as a big Champagne bucket. (In any case, they retained their more conventionally livable place on Shelter Island.)
But last year, 23 Beekman was put on the market (you can buy it still for $18.5 million), and they had to move out. They had come to love the quiet neighborhood with its genteel, full-service apartment houses, and the building on Sutton in which they now rent is a perfect specimen, if the opposite of Rudolph’s experiments.
“We literally walked in and said, ‘Great, we’ll sign the lease,’ ” says Christine. The classic seven has four bedrooms, a wood-burning fireplace, and space for Boris to practice keyboards. “All those things that would perhaps drive other people crazy, like the rattling windows original from the ’20s, we love!” she adds, laughing.
Christine and John first moved to New York in the early 1990s — John to pursue art and Christine event planning. They met at Bill Sofield’s studio, where Christine was working in 1996, when John came in to show his work. Some months later, Sofield hired John. The couple married in 1999. Christine went on to work for André Balazs and John with Thad Hayes and David Easton before starting Gachot Studios in 2012. They recently redesigned the patrons’ lounge at the Metropolitan Opera (they both love the opera) and are collaborating with Sean MacPherson and developer Richard Born on a new hotel in West Palm Beach.
In their own apartment, nothing is precious and everything is inviting. There’s a mix of custom pieces, such as a cinnamon velvet sofa, and vintage, including Dunbar chairs, and lots of art to shake up the mellow mood, like a gold-tone Nancy Lorenz above the fireplace and a mouthwatering photograph by Marilyn Minter in the entrance hall.
“So many of our young friends and designers we know are moving up here,” Christine says. “The scale of the rooms, the spaces, the proper way that these homes are designed, young designers are very appreciative of that.”
Which isn’t to say a downtown return isn’t a possibility. “They were wonderful to us,” Christine says of their Bond Street landlords, “and they even said, ‘Look, if this Beekman Place thing doesn’t work out, just call us and come back down.’”
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