You would think that, for two longtime design dealers and collectors, moving in together would entail an agonizing, OCD-like process of visual choreographing and styling until everything looked magazine-level perfect. In the case of Kyle Garner and Kellen Tucker, though, you’d be mistaken — the couple may do magazine-level work for clients, but when it comes to their own home in Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy neighborhood, it’s barely about looks at all. “The driving force is comfort,” says Tucker, who deals antique textiles through her shop Sharktooth. “If you close your eyes and walk into this house, does it feel good?” Garner, the furniture dealer and designer behind Sit + Read, who moonlights as a DJ, agrees: “We prioritize the feeling over the aesthetic,” he says. “Kellen is interested in crafting smells, and I’m really interested in sound. I don’t really design my own living space.” It’s not that their two-floor brownstone isn’t beautifully appointed, of course, just that it strives for a more visceral appeal.
Part of that has to do with the fact that not only is the house ultimately temporary (it’s a rental), the objects that populate it, by and large, are temporary as well. As dealers — who met via email a decade ago after Tucker discovered Garner’s blog — the couple almost never keep their finds forever; they cycle in and then out again, to her shop, or to his interior projects. They’ve had to train themselves to embrace that state of impermanence, and to value their own well-being more than they value their possessions, to prevent their obsession from burying them. That process took slightly longer for Garner than for Tucker, who kept the house almost empty before Garner moved in with her a year and a half ago. “Suddenly there were kitchen shelves filled with ceramics, and real furniture,” she recalls. “He’s much more of a homemaker than I am. The store takes up all of my energy, so the last thing I wanted was stuff in my house. It was a struggle to find a happy medium.”
Now, they both agree, there’s a good ebb and flow. Garner’s Sottsass lamps happily coexist with Tucker’s antique Persian rugs and Turkish flat-weaves, and Garner keeps himself stimulated by constantly moving things around. “One day a chair will be downstairs, and the next day it will be upstairs,” he says. “Or I’ll find a weird, rusty nail I like the shape of that will change how the mantel is arranged that particular week.” Tucker gives herself room to play, too. “I couldn’t stop buying dandelion paper weights for awhile,” she laughs. “Eventually I was like, enough, that has to go. I can’t help myself from buying weird folk objects that don’t have a place in my store, but eventually they end up in a corner, then outside, and then in a free bin somewhere. The trick is not to feel ownership over them — or feel burdened by them.” Adds Garner: “This apartment is an exercise in restraint.”
Garner and Tucker in their second-floor bedroom, which they painted a cozy shade of dark blue. The photograph above Tucker’s head was taken by Garner’s friend Paul Schiek. “It’s one of my favorite photographs I’ve ever seen,” says Garner. “I love waking up and seeing it every day. I traded him a really amazing Danish sofa for it.”
The photo that hangs over the couple’s dresser is extremely sentimental. “On one of our first dates, we figured out that our families had rented the same house in Cape Cod when we were kids, weeks apart,” says Garner. “About a year ago, while digging through a pile of discarded photos at Brimfield, I found a picture of the very same house, shot in the early 1950s. On the rug is my 12-year-old whippet Nia. In the winter she’ll lay in this spot motionless for a few hours while the sun passes by.”
The couple’s bed is covered with Tucker’s early experiments, “most notably the patchwork quilt,” she says. “It’s made entirely from antique linen scraps dyed every which way, mostly the wrong way. Dyeing is really scientific, a lot of trial and error. I have like 30 more quilts worth of those ‘errors.’”
Those textiles provide a nice textural contrast with the more modern aesthetic of the vintage objects Garner collects, like this bedside table and lamp, the latter of which he found in an antique shop in Paris.
At a flea market in Maine a few years ago, Tucker asked a vendor to buy this piece of fabric. “He explained to me that it was his poncho, and it was not for sale, nor had it ever been washed. He bought it in the ’60s in New Mexico when he was staying at Ghost Ranch, Georgia O’Keeffe’s spot, and wore it every day for years. I sat in his booth and we talked for hours. He gave the poncho to me by the end of the day. It’s still never been washed.”
Despite her appreciation for such weathered items, Tucker also has a soft spot for mirrors and disco balls. “The more mirrored shapes I brought into my life, the more fascinated I became with the science of fractured white light,” she says. “These are a few pieces of defective optical glass. They each distribute light so differently, and the way they interact with eachother, it’s like a morning laser show.”
The other half of the upstairs floor is devoted to what Tucker calls “the listening room” — her favorite room in the house. Garner, pictured here sitting in a new outdoor prototype of his Sit and Read Sling Chair, “hooked up speakers in the two adjacent corners of the room, above the windows. If you lay down in the center of the room — on my #1 favorite rug, a vintage Swedish Rya — it’s a soothing sonic sweet spot.”
Finish samples for the frames of said sling chairs.
Tucker standing in the entrance to the couple’s dressing room, which is just off the listening room. Hanging on the wall beside her is a vintage Turkish Tulu textile. “They’re typically shaggy high-pile rugs woven with angora,” she explains. “This one has nice wear to it, exposing the silky slubby warp yarn. I’m also a sucker for some sun fading.”
An old clothes rack juxtaposed nicely with an old Thonet-style bentwood chair.
Downstairs, the living room is a happy jumble of favorite finds from various eras. The rug is one of Tucker’s prized possessions — one of only three that she says she’ll never sell. “As a dealer, to hold on to a piece is a very deliberate decision. I’ve never seen another one like this. There’s no design or motif other than the border. You can’t see it in the photo, but the weaver started to do a pattern and then stopped, who knows why… I love that.”
The mantel is moreso Garner’s zone, from the crazy ’80s clock to the incredible triangular neon lamp in the center, designed in L.A. in the ’70s by Zimmerman Studios for Archigraphics. “It’s really hard to keep old clocks synced up, so I gave up trying a while ago,” he says. “The Tauba Auerbach clock on the left is the only one that keeps good time.”
A close-up of more of Garner’s mantel trinkets. “When I was a kid I had the bright idea to forge Babe Ruth’s signature on a dirty baseball and sell it to my neighbor to help pay for a BMX bike,” says Garner. “He gave me $5. When my mom found out, she made me buy it back, but secretly thought it was hilarious, and kept it all these years. The string man was made by Jorma, a deceased man whose estate sale was one of the best I’ll ever go to — he had the oddest, most fascinating collections. I like to think he made it to keep him company.”
A view of the other side of the couple’s living room. The vintage Jens Risom chair for Knoll peeking out at right is one of the first pieces of modern furniture that Garner ever bought. “I redid the straps about 10 years ago — it’s been with me for a long time,” he says.
That same chair sitting under a Doug Johnston light. In the fireplace at right is a steel sculpture that weighs 60 pounds. “My mom used to own a gallery and showed the work of this artist,” says Garner. “She never picked up her work after the show, and when the gallery closed a few years later, my mom gave a sculpture to each of her four siblings. My aunt gave me hers when she moved awhile back.”
Garner made these bookshelves out of a bunch of crates he got from an industrial salvage warehouse, held together with compression straps. “The idea is that when (if) we ever move again, I won’t have to pack up my books or records,” he notes.
Before they were dating, Tucker and Garner worked together styling an event for Hermès in which they used a bunch of clock parts as decoration. “The four-pronged thing between the brass deer head and the Sottsass lamp is actually a set of chimes from a mini grandfather clock,” Garner says. “We sort of fought over who got to take it home because it makes the most pleasing sound when you run your finger across it. Now it belongs to both of us.”
In addition to his design work, Garner has moonlighted as a DJ for the past 15 years, and is part of the group that throws Deep Trouble dance parties in Brooklyn. This is his home music studio. “I got the Keith Haring print from the Miranda July show at Partners and Spade a few years back,” he adds. “The little gray amp on the left I unearthed at the Laney Flea Market when I lived in Oakland, and got it for a song. It’s meant to be hooked up to a 16-mm projector but I use it to amplify and record drum machines. It has such a crazy sound. The slipmats are designed by Futura 2000.”
Garner also used to design sets for indie films. “We were wrapping a feature we’d shot in Brooklyn about ten years ago and going through our props when I found this polaroid of Biggie and Faith in an old photo album. It was taken during the shoot for the infamous Vibe Magazine cover, and it’s one of my most-prized posessions. Below it is the cigar Jay- Z gave me when I prop-styled a D’Ussé ad campaign a few years ago. I had it bronzed.”
“It’s a little hard to see the photograph in the frame, but I bought it at the aforementioned Jorma estate sale,” says Garner. “It’s a black and white snapshot of the television screen during the first moon landing, and the text on the screen reads: ‘LIVE FROM THE MOON.’”
Even on a difficult-to-examine shelf situated high above the couple’s kitchen, their object curation is incredibly considered.
A small sampling of Garner’s ever-growing Bennington pottery collection. “We had the chance to visit the factory this past summer,” he says. “Highly recommended!”
More curios displayed on the kitchen shelves.
A Sharktooth tote next to a Sit and Read tote next to a smiley face tote made by friends of Garner’s in L.A., Jona Bechtolt and Claire Evans. “It has a sad face on the other side. Sometimes I flip it around when I’m in a bad mood,” he says.
In the backyard, one last bit of evidence that Garner and Tucker are insatiable collectors — why have one great vintage watering can when you can have three?
Caitlin Mociun may have been the author of a cult-hit fashion line for only a few years, but the lessons she learned from that stint — about the way she wants a customer to feel, or about the way a body moves in space — inform nearly everything she does today. That first becomes clear when she talks about her massively successful fine jewelry line, which she launched almost as a palliative to her days as a clothing designer. “I never really liked doing my clothing line, and when I switched to jewelry it was such a different response,” Mociun told me earlier this fall when I visited her year-old Williamsburg boutique. “It seemed to make people feel good about themselves as opposed to clothing, which often makes people feel bad.” But it’s when she talks about her boutique that you realize that nothing in the shop could be the way it is if Mociun weren’t first a designer.
“I was so dim,” says Greg Krum. It’s a Sunday afternoon, and Krum, best known around New York as retail director of the wonderfully quirky Shop at Cooper-Hewitt, is puttering around the sun-drenched kitchen of a renovated 1890s townhouse he shares with two roommates in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. He’s trying to recall the origins of his other career: that of a photographer about to mount his first solo show this May at New York’s Jen Bekman gallery. “Growing up, I was always attracted to making art, but I didn’t think I could do it because I couldn’t draw. I was like, ‘Okay. That’s out.’ Then I finally realized it’s not about that. It’s about living a life of ideas.”
Like a lot of American designers fresh out of school, Todd Bracher found himself, in the late ’90s, a newly minted graduate of the industrial design program at Pratt designing things like barbecue tools, remote-control caddies, and spice racks. “I remember scratching my head, thinking, ‘Oh my God, this is what design is?’” he recalls one morning from his studio in Brooklyn. Convinced there was something he was missing, Bracher applied for a Fulbright and ended up at age 24 heading to Copenhagen to pursue a master’s in interior and furniture design. What followed was a nine-year boot camp in the rigors of designing for the European market, studded with turns in Milan at Zanotta (where he was the legendary Italian company’s youngest ever designer), London at Tom Dixon (who poached Bracher to help build his London office) and Paris, where he taught part-time and eventually opened up a studio. But personal reasons brought him back to the States in 2007, and the director at Pratt — one of the only people Bracher knew at that point on this side of the ocean — hooked him up with the space he currently occupies in the no man’s land that is the Brooklyn Navy Yard. “My fear, in some ways, is having a place that doesn’t feel like me — which is hard because I don’t necessarily feel like myself in America,” says Bracher.
