A Soft Island in an Industrial Box

There is a particular kind of home that resists the language of real estate entirely — one that cannot be reduced to square footage or neighbourhood or the cold arithmetic of amenities. 

Gabriel Hendifar's SoHo loft is precisely that kind of place. The founder, creative director, and chief executive of Apparatus, the New York interdisciplinary design studio, has spent twelve years building a body of work defined by emotional specificity and material intelligence. His home, occupying a hundred and forty square metres in a nineteen-seventies former industrial building, is where that work comes to rest — and to mean something.

The loft carries one of New York's rarest residential designations: an official artistic residency certificate, permitting live-work occupation of a kind that the city no longer easily grants. It is a fitting bureaucratic detail for a space that refuses to separate living from making. Apparatus pieces fill the rooms — the Cloud 37XL chandelier, the Portal dining table, the Signal X floor lamp — not as showroom inventory but as biographical evidence, the residue of a creative life lived at close quarters with its own output.

What anchors the space emotionally, however, are two Iranian tapestries inherited through three generations of women and gifted to Hendifar by his cousin. Their earth and blue palette, he has said, aligns with the apartment's existing colour story in a way that feels less like coincidence than spiritual confirmation. They hang alongside an Edo-period painting, Persian carpets, a nineteenth-century bronze urn, and Venetian glass — a cross-cultural accumulation that maps, room by room, the contours of an Iranian-American identity.

The industrial bones — exposed iron ceilings, painted brick, raw columns — are softened by carpet, layered textiles, and mirrored walls that double the space and introduce something rarer than volume: the sensation of being seen inside your own home. Hendifar calls it a soft island inside an industrial box. It is also, more quietly, a self-portrait — drawn in light, surface, and inherited memory.

Key takeaways

• Hendifar treats his SoHo loft as a living autobiography, layering Apparatus prototypes, inherited Iranian textiles, and antique objects into a space that is simultaneously personal archive and intimate home.
• Two Iranian tapestries gifted through three generations serve as the emotional and chromatic anchor of the interior, connecting family memory to design intent.
• Mirrored walls, raised platforms, and tactile materials transform raw industrial architecture into what Hendifar calls a soft island — balancing spatial drama with domestic warmth.