Interior Lives: This Upper East Side Apartment Is a Living Work of Art

With dancing vases, a musical couch, and a rag chair, this technicolored Upper East Side apartment doubles as a home for Ruth Lande Shuman and a gallery for Gaetano Pesce, the Italian architect and industrial designer known for creating household objects out of resin and furniture from rags.

Using resin, polyurethane, and paint, Pesce has created a veritable dreamscape, each room more colorful than the last — with every space clueing you in to its function with subtle iconography baked into the design (like fruit on the floor in the dining room) — all in an effort to capture the essence of Shuman and her vibrant life.

In this episode of Interior Lives, our design editor, Wendy Goodman, immersed herself in both Pesce’s surreal, color-saturated world and Shuman’s home, where we learn why fantastical color is so necessary for some apartments.