Design Hunting – What the Gallerists Brought Home

How Patrick Parrish and Alex Gilbert decided what the wanted to live with in their Clinton Hill apartment.

- By Wendy Goodman. Photographs by Clemens Kois

The Living Room

The mobile was "artist-made," Patrick Parrish says. "I don't know anything about it other than it came from New Jersey." The carpet is from Edward Fields, and the sofa is Edward Wormley for Dunbar. The teak-and-cane armchair is by Pierre Jeanneret; it was made for Le Corbusier's utopian city, Chandigarh, in India.

ALEX GILBERT, a director of Friedman Benda gallery, and her husband, Patrick Parrish, head of the eponymous gallery, have a story, or an explanation, for everything that has found its way into their Clinton Hill apartment. "Nothing is arbitrary to me," Gilbert says of the vetting process, from the Adam Fuss photographs and the vintage Ward Bennett sled chairs to the rare, large Gaetano Pesce all-white urn-and even the Miro-esque painting by an unknown artist in the front hall.

By the Front Door

The coat hooks are by Carl Auböck. The large painting is by an unknown artist.

They moved here in 2018 from a 450-square-foot rent stabilized place in Chelsea that had become too small after their son, Clyde, was born. "We'd still be in that apartment if we didn't have Clyde," Parrish says. At first, they tried to find an upgrade in that neighborhood, until a friend of Gilbert's suggested they check out the three-bedroom apartment she was moving out of. The landlord, who lives nearby, let Gilbert and Parrish paint and do some work on the kitchen and bath to bring everything in line with their taste.