Installment Plan

Jan de Cock’s photograph and plywood sculpture are part of an installation that runs through the Westreich-Wagner loft.

The living area, looking toward the kitchen and dining area.

The kitchen, looking toward the study. De Cock placed some of his photographs near the floor and ceiling.

The study, with a sculpture by Keith Tyson under the stairs to the roof. A slot along the side of the staircase allows large-scale paintings to be lowered into the loft.

A painting by Jeff Koons dominates the living area, with its armchairs by Jean-Michel frank and coffee table by Carlo Scarpa. One of de Cock’s plywood sculptures hangs on the wall to the right of the Koons.

THEA WESTREICH, a prominent art adviser, and Ethan Wagner, her husband and business partner, spend their days immersed in the art world. Even at home, they are surrounded by contemporary art, which is exactly how they like to live. But anyone who is expecting the couple’s SoHo loft to be a series of sterile, gallerylike spaces is in for a surprise.

Westreich and Wagner live in what is basically a very large one-bedroom apartment that is filled with an idiosyncratic selection of works by artists ranging from Andy Warhol to Jeff Koons to Jan De Cock (but more about him later) and furniture by 20th-century masters like Pierre Chareau, Carlo Scarpa and George

Nakashima. The 4,500-square-foot interior was renovated by the architect James Harb to provide a clean, precise backdrop for art, and the more of it the better: the couple had already sacrificed two fireplaces and two windows because they took up valuable wall space. (There are plenty of other windows and one fireplace left.)

For several years, the couple lived in three-quarters of the space, renting out the rest. So when they decided to take over the entire floor and renovate, they knew exactly what they wanted. In addition to plenty of space for art, they wanted a large kitchen (Westreich loves to cook and entertain), separate work spaces, climate-controlled storage for wine and cigars (Wagner’s passions) and stairs to the roof of their building — which, although they live on the top floor, they never had. “We thought we should enjoy the roof deck while we could still walk up the stairs,” Westreich says with a smile. Harb lowered the ceilings a bit, to their current height of just over 11 feet, to flatten out the slope of the existing ceiling and to conceal heating and air-conditioning ducts and overhead light fixtures. Although his clients were initially wary of losing any ceiling height at all, they ultimately agreed that Harb’s instincts were right. “The space feels larger,” Westreich says.

So the construction was finished, and the furniture and art were installed, but that was not the end of the story. The couple had asked De Cock, a young Belgian artist, to make a work of art for them. They expected a small version of one of his signature installations, which combine photographs and plywood wall and floor sculptures that comment on their surroundings. (His first American exhibition opens this week at the Museum of Modern Art.) Instead, De Cock — who, Wagner notes, “absorbs space the way you and I absorb air” — inserted his own pieces throughout the entire apartment, in some cases hanging photographs near the ceiling or the floor and making references to the art in the couple’s collection. His photograph of a room with fluorescent-tube lighting, for example, hangs on the same wall as one of Dan Flavin’s fluorescent-light sculptures. De Cock (who knew the exact location of all of the existing artworks) explains that the flow of his pieces throughout the loft also helped eradicate distinctions between the different parts of the space. “It’s like a complete museum gallery — it’s one movie,” he says.

Westreich and Wagner are thrilled with De Cock’s installation, and interestingly, every artist who has visited the loft has been pleased with the way it both unifies and challenges what was already there. De Cock has known Westreich and Wagner for several years (they were the publishers of one of his books and are at work on another), and he says that their home, and everything in it, reflects exactly who they are. Unlike collectors who simply hang a lot of expensive art on the walls, “they really live with their art,” De Cock says. “They don’t make any compromises. Art is not an accessory for them.”

January 20, 2008