Memoirs of a Perfectly Imperfect Fourth-Floor Walk-up

Alex Tieghi-Walker, founder of the gallery Tiwa Select, had just gotten his Noho apartment the way he wanted it when his lease ended.

-  WENDY GOODMAN

SINCE LEAVING London in 2016, Alex TieghiWalker, founder and creative director of the gallery Tiwa Select, has lived in "a shack" in Sonoma, in a drafty barn in Berkeley (which always gave him splinters), in a house in L.A.'s Echo Park that would flood when it rained, and, currently, in New York, though no longer in this fourth-floor Noho walk-up, which he recently had to leave when the lease was up. "I think this inclination to rough it comes from growing up in a beautiful but crumbling Victorian house with no shower and chimneys that made a strange whooshing noise when it was windy," he says.

Then again, he's always been on the move. "When I was a child," he recalls, "we did a lot of traveling, and I spent my entire childhood going to archaeological sites and museums and seeing art collections and houses."