Lee Mindel’s New Gallery in New York Showcases Rare Modernist Furnishings

The likes of Trudie Styler and Sting trust Lee Mindel’s opinions about 20th Century design. An Interior Design Hall of Fame member inducted in 1996, he curates collectible modernism from leading Scandinavian dealers for his architecture clients. This fall, he also delivers a group of rarely-seen furnishings to a public stage in New York. His “Garden of Celestial Delights” exhibition opens the new Galerie 56, a Lower Manhattan project space right downstairs from his own apartment, in the “Jenga” tower by Herzog & de Meuron.

Just before the pandemic, Mindel purchased the gallery’s then-unfinished storefront—partly as a service to his neighbors in the tower. “We didn’t want it to become a nail salon,” he laughs. Workers have continued to toil, assembling and mirror-polishing the developer’s monumental outdoor Anish Kapoor balloon sculpture amusingly squashed under a corner of the tower. New floor-to-ceiling gallery windows practically bring the Kapoor inside: one more precious object on display.

“We’re like a museum for the street,” Mindel says, noting QR codes in the windows that link to descriptions of his inaugural exhibition. Highlights include a rare 1956 Alvar Aalto laminated sculpture in oak, birch, and bronze. A 54-inch Spiral ceiling lamp by Poul Henningsen is one of only five manufactured in 1963. Kallemo designer Mats Theselius upholstered his 1990 Aluminum Armchair in a striking birch-bark basketweave. Almost everything came from Paul Jackson of Jacksons in Stockholm and Ole Høstbo of Dansk Møblelkunst in Copenhagen.

This show runs only through November 14, but Mindel promises a fascinating follow-up illuminating the inspired connection between Isamu Noguchi and Charlotte Perriand. Meanwhile, the gallery remains flexible, thanks to projection and audio infrastructure allowing its temporary configuration as a conference room for large meetings with Shelton Mindel corporate clients. 240 Church Street.

SheltonMindel and Architecture + Information Earn an Iconic Old Classic Best of Year Award for a Private New York Office

2021 Best of Year winner for Iconic Old Classic

Experiencing perhaps the greatest James Turrell piece in New York doesn’t require a museum membership. You only need to have business to conduct with this family-run office. Rising through its double-height reception area is Turrell’s enormous hollow egg shape, a chamber that required a laborious six-month process to construct from white solid-surfacing and concealed LEDs. Typically for this master of light and space, his mysterious conceptual sculpture alters our perceptions. Once you enter the egg and encounter the shifting colors inside, everything outside it looks different for a few seconds.

Like the Turrell, its surroundings make us see the world differently. A Manhattan office, it turns out, can be as graciously proportioned and serene as a Palladian villa. That’s thanks to the impressive real estate: 40,000 square feet of a tower by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and even more so to the joint efforts of the interiors firms, led by Interior Design Hall of Fame members Lee Mindel, Brad Zizmor, and Dag Folger, the latter two the co-founding principals of A+I. Mindel relates the egg installation to the philanthropic work done by the client: “This is a metaphoric think tank. They desired contemplative spaces, as opposed to some others that we all know of. That’s something beyond interior design.”

sheltonmindel: Grace V. Sierra; Michael Neal; Marc C. Newman; Emily M. Meroney; Margaret O’Connor

Architecture + Information: Brad Zizmor; Dag Folger; Cheryl Baxter; Nisha Mary Prasad; Chris Shelley; Abby Kuskin; Aaron Whitney; Katina Max Kremelberg

This SoHo Loft by Lee F. Mindel is Anything But Soulless

2021 Best of Year winner for Large Apartment

You’d never guess that, before Lee F. Mindel came on the scene, this airy SoHo loft, home to a young art consultant, was a soulless, cookie-cutter three-bedroom in a new development. The firm principal blasted open the 4,400-square-foot floor plan—replacing Sheetrock with white-lacquered panels, white-oak partitions, and glass pocket doors—to instate more gracious spatial proportions and flowier circulation. Mindel’s strategy for giving grandeur to the standard-issue anodized-aluminum windows was to “thicken” the walls around them and darken their boxy depth in a manner reminiscent of Donald Judd sculptures. The result is akin to “dioramas framing views of the neighboring cast-iron historic buildings,” the Interior Design Hall of Fame member explains. “Plus, the added depth creates the illusion you’re in a masonry building.” Eschewing drop ceiling and downlights in favor of exposing the full volume of the space, Mindel installed luminous LED blades—rectangular in the living room, circular in the dining area—that lend activation overhead. “The idea,” the architect notes, “was that the ceiling, with these De Stijl–like overlapping graphics, become its own artistic plane.” Other than the living room’s Pierre Paulin sofa and the Maarten Baas dining chairs, furnishings are custom, designed by the firm to suit the newly salonlike spaces.

sheltonmindel: Lee F. Mindel