Lisa: We were open to a change. We found our new home through a real estate platform. While the pictures in the ad didn’t show much, the marble floors and wood paneling were intriguing. I knew we had to at least take a look!
Issa: And then as we walked through the door for the first time, we thought “Wait, something like this really exists?” The materials, the huge floor plan, the open glass… the aura of the building grabbed us immediately.
Do you know who the architect was who designed the house?
Lisa: All we know is that it was commissioned by an industrialist in 1968 who definitely had a sense of the aesthetics of his time. He had the courage to put down green marble. Every day here the house shows how it was meant to bring people together.
How did you go about furnishing it?
Lisa: The nice thing about objects that have a past is that they bring so much with them. It was important for me to respect and draw out what this house already had to reveal. In the living room, the light-orangish teak cabinets and drawers work well with the sea-green marble and blue-gray slate wall. I love this play of warm and cold. My ocher corduroy couch that we brought from Berlin fits perfectly with the existing color palette. I tried to create a feeling of warmth and security through textured materials, especially bouclé and linen. I am definitely a material junkie. In fact, the house was last used as a consulate, and the bedrooms and children’s rooms had been offices. And so I wanted to introduce a little more coziness upstairs by using earthy and red-toned colors on the wall to break up the austere atmosphere.
Issa: I have to give my wife credit for the interiors. It was a really great experience for me to watch her find the right space in which to express her creativity and to support her in setting up our home. We complement each other very well that way. When it comes to furniture, Lisa knows exactly what she wants. My focus was on our art collection. It means a lot to me to live with works by artists who I’ve known for a good part of my life.
For the last decade, I’ve worked with a lot of contemporary artists from New York, LA, and Chicago and managed them somewhat too. The large rope artwork in the living room is by Seth Damm from New Orleans. We planned it together for over a year and designed it especially for this room. On the dresser is a work that queer artist Erika Weitz made for us. She took a couple of old pieces of wood from two Indian temples and made them into a sculpture. The work’s called Love Birds.
Lisa: We are the “love birds”! We also have three works by the Berlin-based painter Ál Varo.
