In Bushwick, a designer’s own home embodies a quirky, open ethos

Inside Brooklyn designer Michael Yarinsky's carefully crafted two-bedroom apartment

Public buildings and spaces often get the glory when it comes to design accolades. Finnish architect Alvar Aalto put it this way: "I tell you, it is easier to build a grand opera or a city center than to build a personal house." But homes are the stages on which life happens, and designer Michael Yarinsky believes in treating them with care, attention, and affection.

For Yarinsky's own home, in Brooklyn's Bushwick neighborhood, he focuses on natural light and the textures and colors of a wide palette of materials, creating a space that evolves as continuously as his practice.

"Designing space," says Yarisnky, "is about...touching things, smelling things, and feeling the sun on your face."

A Likeminded Objects lamp sits next to a custom desk and Bi-Right chair. The table lamp is by Menu.

A piece by Chiaozza is wedged into a corner of the ceiling. The figure drawing below is Ohni Lisle.

A Michael Yarinsky for Dittohouse blanket sits in the seat of an Alvar Aalto Paimio Chair, while Chen & Kai coasters sit atop a pre-Artek Alvar Aalto Stool 60.

Yarinsky moved into the apartment three years ago, sharing the two-bedroom home with a roommate. It was then that Yarinsky built the bookshelf in his bedroom, removed a layer of drywall over the brick throughout the home, added air conditioning, and renovated the bathroom.

When his roommate moved out at the beginning of 2019, Yarinsky decided to go solo, embarking on a second renovation. He transformed the second bedroom and, with permission from his landlord, cut an amoeba-shaped hole between it and the living room to create a dining room filled with light and artwork. "[My landlord] doesn't know quite what it looks like, but he knows that I'm a designer, so he's pretty trusting," says Yarinsky.

Yarinksy's dining table is a modified Reform kitchen panel, and the dining chairs are Folke Pallson. Broste plates, Amelia Black bowls, and CB2 flatware partner up with Ferm Living glassware, Louise Roe mugs, an Anderssen & Voll candlestick, a Workaday Handmade serving bowl, and aluminum trivets by Yarinsky and Rosie Li.

Designer Michael Yarinksy at his dining table.

The playful cut-out "brought light into the center of the apartment where there was just, like, basically none before," Yarinksy explains, adding that the opening is sometimes mistaken for a mirror. "Including a massive dining room [in a tiny apartment]—it's kind of a funny thing. But it's also makes complete sense in this layout." The space, Yarinsky adds, is "really a machine for dinner parties."

Yarinsky says that while he often injects these kinds of organic shapes into his work, he didn't have a lot of that in his home. He wanted to incorporate this design to tie his home more closely, visually, to his other projects.

"I wanted to create a conversation between this and my other work, making [that window] integral to the space," he says. Yarinsky goes on to say that for clients, it's a risky thing to incorporate these types of permanent elements, with people leaning toward daring furniture instead—which can be rotated out if a client's taste changes. Being able to exhibit the success of some of his more daring design moves in his own home makes it clear that such choices can work in other spaces just as effectively.

The cut-out Yarinksy made creates a visual link between the living and dining rooms. The sofa and record shelving are custom, by Yarisnky and Pat Kim. The pillows are from Steven Alan. The refurbished coffee table is home to a blue Russel Wright bowl. An Anthony Cudahy piece hangs above the shelves.

The kitchen sports custom terrazzo countertops. A pink Fort Standard bowl and a ceramic urn by Jessica Hans sit to the left.

Construction was simple: Yarinsky drew a line on the wall with a pencil and took a reciprocal saw to it. "The fact that it looks like this hand drawn line in the air, is because it is," he says, laughing. The clean edging is informed from his architectural work, and he had it finished by a plaster worker.

Beyond the use of organic shapes, a few themes emerge in both Yarinsky's practice and in his home. One is a love of collaboration: Yarinsky, who operates his eponymous interdisciplinary studio near the Brooklyn Navy Yard and designs restaurants, residences, and retail spaces, also runs Design Field Trip with Jean Lee and Dylan Davis of Ladies & Gentlemen Studio, and is the lead curator for Cooler Gallery.

One of Yarinksy's cats finds a perch in the cut-out between his living and dining rooms.

These types of partnerships have also inspired furnishings, artwork, and objects throughout his home. "Half of the furniture in the house is custom, and the other half is selected pieces that I'm really a fan of," says Yarinksy. Every piece in his home, he goes on to explain, is either by a designer from the past that has influenced him or a contemporary designer with whom he is friends. He points to the light fixture in the dining room, designed with Lee and Davis at Ladies & Gentlemen Studio; and a daybed and record shelving by Pat Kim.

Yarinsky is especially fond of Alvar Aalto's work because, he says, it reflects his own philosophy about furnishings, one that centers people in a space and concerns itself with how to support them both physically and emotionally. The Aalto-designed lounge chair originally made for the Paimio Sanatorium is one of Yarinsky's favorites.

The lounge chair was made with "the idea that someone is meant to look out at a sunset and regain health," says Yarinsky. "There's this deeper, conceptual wellness element to it, but in a premodern way. It's round because it's meant to be touched."

A CB2 sconce illuminates Yarinsky's bed, which is dressed with Dusen Dusen textiles.

A hand-painted shower curtain by Elise McMahon of Likeminded Objects hangs in the bathroom.

Another tenet to which Yarinsky adheres is sensitivity to space; anything he incorporates is included with intention. His projects tend to feel "light, bright, and open" says Yarinsky, and this aesthetic is guided by a desire to create moods in a space, too. He relied on this thinking in his own home, which he says he "wanted to be a place where he could come in and be challenged, aesthetically and conceptually. He adds: "I like surrounding myself with friction."

To Yarinsky, what interiors can do when they are at their best is create opportunities for people to forge close connections with one another, as well as the furnishings and objects in their environment.

"Does it make you feel how you want to feel?" he questions. "Does it bring up the ideas that you want to be constantly immersed in? Do the details inspire you?"

Yarinsky playfully warns that his space might not look the same within a year. "I'm all about continuing to morph and change and make things better, switch around the art," he says. "It's all an experimentation for me, specifically because it's my own. I want to keep changing."