The House of Collection....

The house of Collection, Williamsburg, NY

In the Brooklyn loft of Paige Stevenson and Ahnika Meyer, the garden is off the kitchen.

The House of Collection indoor Garden

The House of collection in Williamsburg, NY is the home of Paige Stevenson and her partner Ahnika Delirium. Such a beautiful interesting home deserves an explanation so here is part of an interview from May 2011 from The New York Times....

"Paige Stevenson moved every few years when she was a child in the 1970s, living, among other places, in a tepee on a commune in Mendocino County, Calif.; on a goat farm near the commune; and in a Victorian house in San Francisco with her father, stepmother and a coterie of drag performers. In her adult life, she has chosen something far less nomadic: a loft in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where she has been since 1989. “I don’t ever have plans to really be elsewhere,” Ms. Stevenson said. 

The apartment, which she shares with her partner, Ahnika Meyer, 30, is a 21st-century cabinet of curiosities in the form of a 2,000-square-foot loft. They call it the House of Collection, as it is filled with stuff — some of it eccentric, much of it old and almost all of it scavenged, from remote sites like steel mills near Pittsburgh and others as close as the curb outside.

“Most of the things I decorate with are considered garbage,” said Ms. Stevenson, 43, a bookkeeper for nonprofit organizations. “Things that would deteriorate if I didn’t pick them up and save them.”

The care with which those objects are selected and arranged is what keeps the House of Collection on this side of chaos. Ms. Meyer said, “All of this stuff is an installation.”

Dozens of rusted farm tools and industrial artifacts, for instance, are displayed salon-style in the living room, grouped by shape or function on a white wall of painted cinder block. A cow skull and other bones, picked up in Montana by Ms. Stevenson’s parents, are arranged on another wall that is covered in the ornate pressed tin common in Brooklyn restaurants. An early 20th-century plow, found in a salvage yard, hangs overhead.

“To some people this would be ugly,” Ms. Meyer said. “But to other people, this is kind of earthy and lush.”

The couple’s decisions about what to collect are more deliberate than they might seem. “It’s an aesthetic decision,” Ms. Stevenson said. “If it appeals to my eye or my mind, it’s a keeper.” They revel in giving a home to unloved objects, possessions that were once dear to someone and then discarded.

An indoor garden area, centered around a fraying wicker couch, brings green to a space filled with the reds and browns of Oriental rugs and rusty mechanical parts. A trove of plants, about 70 or so, sits on an elevated platform beside the windows, and vines wend their way through a dangling fishing net that Ms. Stevenson found in Nova Scotia. Even bouquets of dead flowers, still in their vases and grouped on a cabinet, have a place in the apartment. “To me, they still have beauty,” Ms. Stevenson said."

..... To see the rest of the interview and more images of this beautiful apartment head over to the New York Times website here

To rent the apartment head over to airbnb here 

and if you like this home you may like the home of...Ettore Guatelli