The Black Apartment” has gone white.
A famed coal-colored lacquer loft in Chelsea well-known for its sexed-up Shanghai nightclub theme is returning to market, stripped of the décor that made it famous.
Gone are the erotic accessories, the decorative handcuffs, the nude portraiture, the animal skins and the Gucci chain saw.
Instead, the apartment, which was featured in the Notorious B.I.G’s music video “Nasty Girl,” will be painted all in white.
But design buffs needn’t hang their heads in dismay.
The new look is just courtesy of a design firm which reimagined the home digitally without the belongings of its current owner, Cindy Gallop, a former advertising executive who runs a sex website called MakeLove NotPorn.
Gallop’s eccentric, naughty style got her cited on fashion and design blogs around the world, but it hasn’t done her any favors when it comes to finding a buyer for her home, which has been on and off the market for a year with an asking price of nearly $6 million.
“I’m very conscious of the fact that that you’re looking at the results of a lifetime trekking around flea markets and junk shops,” Gallop said. “This is my entire life as a story on display. People love it, but they have to be able to feel like they can bring themselves and their own lives in here.”
Gallop’s new brokers, Claudia Saez-Fromm and Mark David Fromm of Town Residential, also plan to start a social-media marketing campaign for the property, encouraging interior designers to create their own takes on how the black apartment could be re-created to appeal to different tastes and preferences. In the real world, as opposed to the virtual world, of course, Gallop’s design remains intact.
The apartment was even given a brand new look by virtual stagers
“We want to cast a wider net for buyers,” Saez-Fromm said.
Gallop bought the 3,600-square-foot apartment, in the former men’s locker room of a YMCA at 213 W. 23rd St., for $1.51 million in 2005. She was inspired to decorate it in all black while sipping a martini in a nightclub in Shanghai.
“I remember sitting there in a drunken haze thinking, ‘I wish I lived somewhere like this,’ ” she said. “Call me biased, but I really think more art galleries should paint their walls black because it really makes paintings pop so much.”
[Source:- NY Daily news]
