How To Swing From A Chandelier

Design’s new pied pipers are a couple of lighting wizards. Can the Apparatus boys seduce the rest of us into buying $68,000 lamps?

- Carl Swanson

The long-shuttered RKO Hamilton Theater at 146th Street and Broadway in Harlem is not a place you’d expect to find Hamish Bowles or Linda Fargo or Lindsey Adelman on a Saturday night. But in May they had UberBlacked their way to upper Manhattan to join a festive throng of bleedingly hip architects, buttoned-up interior designers, and resplendent club kids at what has become a must-attend bacchanal, the annual party thrown by the decadently flush lighting and luxury furniture house Apparatus.

This year’s party was bigger than ever: a one-night-only event that manifested inside a graffiti-splattered movie palace built in 1913 that had been found by a TV location scout. At 11:30 the music swelled, and The Late Show’s Gospel Choir appeared at the lip of the balcony. As it steamrolled through a Larry Levan remix of “Stand on the Word,” there was rustle of panic, a fear that all this bouncing and swaying might just cause the romantically decrepit balcony to collapse, crushing us all in fabulousness.

But instead of tragedy it was another improbable, cost-is-apparently-no-object success for Apparatus’s founders, the husband-and-husband team of Gabriel Hendifar, 38, and Jeremy Anderson, 43. Over the past decade their meticulously patinated creations, with such bespoke details as silk cords and glowing Chinese porcelain, have disrupted the staid and corporatized lighting fixtures world. “I remember going to their showroom for the first time and thinking, ‘Oh my god, they get a kind of luxury and spareness no one else does,” says Wendy Goodman, New York magazine’s design editor. “You wanted to live in their world: pared down and sexy and elegant. There was nothing mingy or minimalist about their aesthetic. It was luxurious without being effusive.”