LOUNGE ACT
Interior designer and cabaret singer Anthony Cochran leaves Brooklyn behind in favor of a Manhattan studio with deep seating, plush velvets, and lots of mood lighting.
Text by Sophie Donelson. Photography by Eric Piasecki. Portrait by Timothy Kolk. Produced by Anita Sarsidi.
If you had to choose just one room in which to live, what would it be? A stately living room? Serene Bedroom? Verdant winter garden? For Anthony Cochran, the question wasn’t hypothetical. Upon taking possession of his new apartment, a studio in Manhattan’s West Village that clocks in at barely 400 square feet, the interior designer realized he didn’t have the option of multiple design schemes. So he boldly picked a private library as his ideal space and set about making a moody, elegant chamber to complement that mental image.
After eight years of living in Brooklyn, Cochran, who works in Manhattan, finally conceded he “couldn’t ride the subway another day.” So for the luxury of being able to walk to the office, he left a spacious one-bedroom for a studio that has “about as much architectural merit as a cardboard box.” On his first night, he tossed an air mattress in a corner and awoke face to face with the studio’s chief feature: a dazzling view of downtown Manhattan. With that urban landscape spread out before his eyes, Cochran decided that where the mattress landed was where his bed would go, and the rest of the room began to evolve.
In Brooklyn, Cochran, a cofounder of the Q Collection of environmentally friendly fabrics and furniture, had whitewashed his rooms and ornamented them with white ceramic accessories. “I wanted it to feel like a cloud, but it ended up feeling like a monastery,” he says. A few years later a bordello-bold scheme of burgundy silk curtains, olive walls, and chocolate velvet bedding was more to his liking. This time around, Cochran refined that earlier richness by painting the apartment’s walls a calm putty-gray (non-toxic, naturally) and installed a cabernet-red carpet over the parquet. The studio’s anchor is a low, velvet-and-mohair daybed nestled against high upholstered sides. More than just providing a place to sleep, it is fundamental to the smooth operation of Cochran’s lifestyle, which includes many evenings when 15 or more guests arrive for cocktails and dinner served from a pocket-size kitchen aglitter with silver-mica wall covering. “With only one room, people feel like they’re invading your privacy,” he says. “They don’t want to sit on your bed. Here, guests immediately sit on the daybed, and then ask, ‘Where’s your bedroom?’ They think it’s behind the closet door.”
The designer’s fascination with light, specifically low light, gives his spatially challenged chamber the ambience of a cozy cocktail lounge. Which makes perfect sense, considering that Cochran performs at the cabaret Don’t Tell Mama and has warbled Irish ballads and rock tunes in sold-out-shows. “In a studio, you have to make people feel comfortable, warm, and welcome,” he says, adding, “There are nine light sources in the apartment, and not one without a dimmer.” (The designer admits that he would put a dimmer in the refrigerator, too, if he could.) Notable is the 1970’s industrial ceiling fixture, whose long filament bulbs let out a faint, atmospheric rattle when turned on. They also gobble power, alas, so Cochran saves their full glow for special occasions. And above a Danish rosewood cabined hands a driftwood sculpture, its gnarled branches studded with mercury-tipped bulbs.
Other prizes from intrepid junking sprees include the sofa and high-back armchair, a wall-sized mirror found in a barn, and many ceramics in shades of white, remnants from his binge in Brooklyn, though, he reveals, “I got rid of a lot of it.” Drawings and painting punctuate the walls, including what Cochran calls a fake Cezanne and fake Matisse. His only serious art is a small 19th-century Danish canvas depicting a clump of trees beneath a clouded sky.
Retro finds and antiques notwithstanding, the apartment Cochran calls a little cocoon doesn’t represent any particular decade. But there is one style moment that he keeps in mind. “I often think of this as my Barefoot in the Park apartment,” he says, recalling the Neil Simon comedy set in Greenwich Village in the 1960’s. The designer has even co-opted its title for his own abode, engraving his note cards with BINTPARK. “My apartment is a little ‘50’s, though it could be the ‘40’s or the ‘60’s,” he says. “Up here, looking out the window at the old buildings in lower Manhattan, you really can’t tell the difference.”
