Here, we ask designers to take a selfie and give us an inside look at their life.
Names: Nathan and Catherine Bruckner
Occupation: Design Studio
Instagram: @casalta_studio
Hometown: Brussels, Belgium and Vienna, Austria
Studio Location: New York City
Describe what you make: Interiors and objects for the home.
Describe the problem your work solves: We don’t necessarily see our interiors as solving an urgent problem. Being able to renovate a home to exacting standards and live with art and beautiful objects is a rare luxury. Our role is to help our clients create beautiful homes, with the care and consideration that we applied to our own renovation.
The most important thing you’ve designed to date: Our former apartment in the Flatiron District, which we gut renovated and lived in before selling. It’s where we further developed our shared aesthetic and learned how to carry out a comprehensive renovation from start to finish together. After designing it together, we got deeply involved in the construction and the details.
For example, we designed doors and cabinetry that referenced designs by Auguste Perret, a French architect from the early 20th century. On a trip to Paris, we visited every Perret project that was accessible and took a lot of detail pictures. After designing our doors and cabinets, we sourced very specific cuts of French oak for the solid wood and veneer pieces from a vendor in upstate New York. We flew to Buffalo for a day trip and drove to this vendor to select each veneer cut. When it came to applying the veneer pieces to the various panels, we personally laid them out and oversaw the pressing. I prepared my own walnut stain by grinding and brewing walnut husks from France in our kitchen, which we then applied by hand. We specified some very specialized pivot hinges, handles, escutcheons, and the various fittings that the doors and cabinets required from a maker in Ghent, Belgium, and traveled there to see how they were made. This is just for the doors and cabinetry, but it gives you a sense of the level of detail and the rabbit holes we went into.
We developed a similar level of expertise in various parts of a detailed renovation process. That project was completely formative for us. It was also the project that made us want to start Casalta. We discovered how much we loved the entire process of building an environment from scratch and wanted to do it again, for others.
Describe the project you are working on now: We’re designing an apartment in a new residential building with a Brutalist façade in the West Village, overlooking the Hudson River. The building is nearing completion, and once our client takes possession, we’ll begin a comprehensive renovation of the interior. The home is being designed around the client’s remarkable art collection. In many ways, it’s a dream project for us, and it’s giving us a lot of creative energy.
A new or forthcoming project we should know about: This week, we launched our debut Objects collection, expanding Casalta’s perspective to homewares. The collection brings together 14 pieces that we felt were missing from our own daily lives and interiors. We’ve been working on the Objects for a number of years and are thrilled to finally be sharing them.
What you absolutely have to have in your studio: Art and design books for reference, and objects that we continually source for reference. It’s also important that our studio is a place we’ve renovated to some extent so it feels like us. It has to be a little bit of our world.
What you do when you’re not working: Raising our kids in the city.
Sources of creative envy (dead or alive): Recently, we’ve been paying attention to and thinking about the creativity of children. We look at the artwork lining the hallways, classrooms, and lobbies of the schools where we drop off our kids, and some of it is just so good. It makes us think about that unspoiled, unbridled creativity that many artists like Basquiat, Picasso, and Twombly were able to somehow access, but that doesn’t remain accessible to most of us.
Matthieu Blazy is a big creative crush for both of us right now—for us and the rest of the world, apparently. When we look at his work at Chanel, and Bottega Veneta before that, we feel like there’s an amazing childlike quality to it. It’s subtle, but he seems able to tap into his inner child’s wonder. We’re envious of that.
The distraction you want to eliminate:
Nathan: My New York Times and Wall Street Journal apps. I’ve been checking them and reading random articles throughout the day a bit compulsively for the past few years. It’s a compulsion I probably should work on eliminating. Catherine, on the other hand, seems to have no equivalent. No procrastination, no wasting time on social media, no compulsive news reading. It’s actually amazing.
Concrete or marble? Both. We’re incorporating concrete into some interior walls of our West Village project, taking a cue from the building’s facade. Some great art will be installed on concrete. It just looks so good, just like art on a good wood-clad wall can be so good. Auguste Perret’s interiors, which I referenced before, are another touchstone for the use of concrete, which he was a real pioneer of. His combination of exposed concrete columns and oak floors and cladding is so beautiful. Nathan: Just today, I watched the trailer for John Wilson’s The History of Concrete, which is playing at the IFC right now. The trailer is footage of concrete around New York set to dramatic classical music. I think the joke is that there couldn’t be a duller subject, but I immediately perked up. I’m definitely going to see it. I could go on just as long about marble. Limestone, too. Granite, less so.
High-Rise Or Townhouse? We can get really excited about both.
Remember or Forget? I guess it’s about striking the right balance?
Aliens or Ghosts?
Nathan: As a kid I was really afraid of ghosts and didn’t spend any time thinking about aliens. Now I don’t think about either.
Catherine: Ghosts, but not the scary kind. More in the sense of history, memory, old houses, and the lives lived in them before us.
Dark Or Light? Both. Light and darkness are both important elements in how we design a space.
