The challenge for Ruttenberg was to inject warmth and humanity to the rooms, without losing its masculine core, or interfering with its classic shape, parquet floors, or moldings. A midcentury black leather sofa by Design Research Inc. acted as an anchor item in the living room. To this scene he added a cotton rug—gently scalloped in a green pastel—as a base layer, and then a fabric club chair on a polished steel and brass swivel, a rolling vanity chair in lucite, and a Brick Screen by Eileen Gray. The entryway and the kitchen are both a sumptuous bluish green “that has warmth, but it also has this kind of coolness,” the designer says. The breakfast nook is deliberately cozy, cast in natural light.
The space is punctuated by many of Ruttenberg’s custom pieces. Abutting the sofa is a console table that he had designed at Master Kitchen, a kitchen supply company in the Lower East Side. “The guy took out a napkin and a pen, and we started designing this console table that I had in the back of my head for a while,” he says. “Two weeks later, it was delivered at my doorstep.” The client is a music enthusiast, so while the audio systems live inside the console, their wires invisibly extend to a record player on top. Nearby, a repurposed deep fryer holds his records: Roxy Music’s Flesh and Blood, Townes Van Zandt’s self-titled album, and Talking Heads’ Speaking in Tongues. Visually, these notes bounce back to the console, to the chrome swivel, and then are enveloped in a comely, cushioned daybed, another NJCR piece.
And then there are the accents: sculptures of the client’s dog’s head, and rear, make drawer pulls for the banquette; antique lugnuts form bookends; a cocktail table, which Ruttenberg constructed himself from piping, gamely bisects the sofa with its built-in backgammon board. The pull and pull of the hard and soft, fun and fabricated, the textured taffy-ness, continues with the dining table, a pedestal table in reflective glass, edged by a custom banquette, its cushion in a subtly striped blue fabric, and Vico Magistretti Carimate Chairs, their natural wicker and wood balancing out the sheen.
