Ronald Bricke has always known what he wants. For the past 30 years, he’s lived in an apartment in the Lenox Hill neighborhood of Manhattan, a place he’d dreamed about a decade before signing on the dotted line. “When I was first working in New York,” says Bricke, now an interior designer at the helm of his own firm, “I would pass by a building going up that I thought was pretty groovy.” The rent was unattainable on a young assistant’s salary, but in the back of his mind Bricke considered, “Maybe someday.”
Fast-forward 10 years to an impending relocation and indifferent realtors who kept showing him the dreaded “white brick building with an L-shaped living room.” About to quit searching, Bricke found himself near the Upper East Side building he remembered. As luck would have it, he was whisked into an available one-bedroom unit awash in warm daylight. “It was like opening the door onto the island of Santorini,” he says. “I’ve been there since.”
Not every detail was an immediate fit. One modification Bricke made upon arrival was to refinish the floors with inspiration culled from Rembrandt paintings depicting 17th-century Dutch churches. He transformed the standard parquet hardwoods into a geometric pattern that would “accept the diagonal line of the furniture and adhere to the rectangular shape of the room.” Within the dominant brown-and-white pattern, he laid out a couple of red squares—one under a table in the entry hall, another below the dining table. “Most of the time people never saw them, but occasionally someone would drop something,” he explains. It became one of Bricke’s signature design moves, a wink and a nod at observant visitors, which he’s since titled “under-the-table art.”
Although the red squares are now history, a carved turtle currently serves the same purpose. Bricke wanted the piece but feared he had no permanent spot for it in his home. “Well, turtles crawl out from under rocks,” he rationalized. “This one’s going to crawl from under the marble coffee table.” He started hanging canvases and setting sculptural forms beneath tables—covert gestures that allow the flat to maintain its spacious quality. Bricke also makes a point of keeping walls minimal in rooms used for entertaining. ”I didn’t want a lot of stuff to distract your eye. I wanted to focus on certain things,” he says, such as the late–1st century BC seated Greek goddess for which he renovated a corner of the living room. (He disliked the fractured shadow cast by the sculpture on two adjoining walls, so he curved the intersection to form an uninterrupted canvas.)
The main design elements of the apartment are chosen for their relationship to Bricke’s art collection. (His interest in antiquities began in grade school after he discovered Homer’s epic poetry.) “All my furniture is white because I want the works to stand out,” he says. “I want the form of the furniture, but I don’t want to notice it specifically.” Other pieces, such as the set of four 18th-century dining chairs, telegraph Bricke’s cultivated wit. The back of each solid walnut chair features a carved medallion depicting a member of the historical Dutch family that had commissioned them. “They’re delightful. There’s mom, dad, and two ugly daughters.”
In contrast to the living and dining areas, the bedroom features rich aubergine walls and groupings of eclectic paintings. The room’s draperies can be strategically drawn to reveal the displays or spread to create a more restful atmosphere.
Lest his home become a disorderly pen of priceless works, Bricke is careful not to let clutter disturb the peace. The designer hides items purged from his current rotation in an accessory closet. “They can come out later on and refresh the eye. The Japanese believe that you shouldn’t keep looking at the same thing in the same location,” he says. Ronald Bricke has always known what his space needs, just as he knows what he needs from his space.
