June 9, 2024When Josh Evan and Michael Edward Moirano first saw the house in Greenwich, Connecticut, that a young couple from Manhattan purchased during the pandemic, every room was a white box. The path of least resistance would have been to keep things neutral and subdued.
But the clients have larger-than-life personalities, Evan says, and they deserved a house more like them. So he and Moirano, whose five-year-old firm is called Evan Edward, got busy looking for bold pieces that make big impressions. In the living room, a curving gray velvet sofa is the closest thing to a conversation pit. With the sofa embracing an oval rug, the room seemed to eschew right angles. The arms of two fabulously mismatched 1940s armchairs — one Swedish, the other by the French designer André Arbus — add curlicues. Then, the designers went on what Evan calls “a major coffee table search.” The couple already owned one composed of a gold-leafed sheaf of wheat holding a round glass top. The designers wanted another table to complement it. Moving from flora to fauna, they found a “turtle top” coffee table by Philip and Kelvin LaVerne and convinced the clients to buy it. “We explained that it’s small, but it has a big impact,” says Moirano. The few items in the room that are rectilinear are broken up by corner-less patterns: The windows are covered in leopard print and the Garrison Rousseau parsons table in a horn veneer.
Move further through the house, and the living room begins to seem conventional. The breakfast area, for instance, pairs a Murano glass butterfly chandelier with a Stefan Rurak dining table so custom that its concrete base bears the kids’ handprints. Together they form a kind of whirlwind at the center of the room, with the cantilevered chrome dining chairs along for the ride. The cabinets allow the cyclone to be seen against a grid.
Equally dramatic is the children’s study, which Evan says is really the house’s command center. The colors were drawn in part from the clients’ Mickey Mouse–themed work by the Pop artist Robert Mars, now hanging over the fireplace, and in part from colors elsewhere in the house that the designers wanted to repeat. “It was hard explaining how blue, green and orange would go together, but they do,” says Moirano.
It seems unimaginable that the husband’s office was ever white, given the rich, regal tones that Evan and Moirano gave it. Because they were redoing the room at a time when “life was conducted on Zoom, we wanted to give him a boss office,” Evan says, adding, “Boss in both senses of the word.” The lacquered-goatskin desk from John Salibello and the copper-leafed wall behind it form a rich backdrop for video conferences. But even parts of the room not seen on camera are dramatic. One tier of the coved ceiling is gold leaf, another is papered with 13 yards of Schumacher’s Metalliferous in aged copper. The rust-colored sofa, the Murano-glass and brass chandelier, from Lomomomo, and accessories like Venini’s Murano glass Clessidra hourglass in amber and pink give the room a kind of dusky drama. “I can’t believe he let us make it as moody as it is,” says Evan of the client.
Neither Evan nor Moirano took a conventional route to interior design. Josh Evan grew up in Miami, then moved to Dallas to study communications and art history at Southern Methodist University. He worked in fashion and entertainment PR on both coasts until 2016, when he and his partner relocated to a townhouse in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. He bought so much furniture that he started selling pieces right out of the house — which became a business he named Milton Studio for the street it was on. A customer asked him to redo her house in East Hampton. He took the job then quickly found people who could guide him. Chief among them was an upholsterer who took Evan under her wing and became, more than any interior designer, his mentor. “She was old-school,” he says. “There’s an artistry, knowledge of fabrics, almost like couture.” Her tutelage helped him complete the East Hampton job successfully, “and it just rolled on from there.”
Moirano grew up in Chicago. After studying architecture at Yale, he went to work for the designer Ahmad Sardar-Afkhami, whom he assisted on projects as exotic as an elephant sanctuary in Myanmar. He and Evan met as neighbors in New York’s East Village. They started working together on small residential jobs, but when the moonlighting reached a critical mass for Moirano, in 2018, he left his day job to become the second half of Evan Edward. I figured, “All right. I can make a leap.”
Three years later, Evan left New York to open the firm’s Miami office. But the two men see each other at least twice a month. Says Evan, “Building a business together is almost like having a child. It has to be cared for and nurtured. Luckily, we are aligned on almost everything.” So much so, Moirano jokes, that since starting the business “we’ve begun to look alike.”
Luckily, their interiors don’t look alike, as evidenced by their three different versions of the same East Village loft. Evan “did” it first, 15 years ago, for model Erin Wasson. Around 2020, she had Evan Edward do “a light refresh,” Moirano says. They posted photos of the project on their 1stDibs portfolio. The loft was later sold to a Long Island couple — a businessman/musician and an artist — who planned to use it as a pied-à-terre. When the pair came across photos of the loft on 1stDibs, they called Evan Edward. They asked the designers to retain the feeling of a classic loft but add all kinds of creature comforts. “How do you make it luxurious without it being obviously luxurious?” Evan and Moirano asked themselves. While essentially gutting the loft, they retained the odd blue-painted rafters and the original brick walls. “You couldn’t pay to have a patina like that,” Evan says.
But then they changed the loft’s entire palette. “Imagine spilling a glass of wine,” says Moirano. “But it’s not just any glass of wine. It’s the finest Bordeaux, which you bought at auction. That beautiful stain became our palette.” And once that palette was established, “they really let us run with it,” he says of the clients. In the main living area, a sectional sofa from Modern Drama via 1stDibs faces a smaller Adrian Pearsall sofa in a cloud-patterned velvet. At the center is a teak-root coffee table by Andrianna Shamaris, whom Evan calls “the master of organic modernism.” The rosewood dining table, also by Shamaris, the walnut and burl dining chairs and the 19th-century French industrial table from Elaine Claire were all bought on 1stDibs. The hauntingly beautiful fixture over the dining table is an early-career design by Angelo Lelii, who later founded the innovative lighting company Arredoluce. Adding even more layers, a 1950s artwork in translucent glass hangs over a frosted window in the dining area. At the other end of the main room, what had been a reading nook became a music area, with shaggy cotton armless chairs by Timothy Oulton and a shoji-fronted console by Brian Holcombe.
The finished loft, Moirano says, is a respite. “One minute you’re on the street in a gritty New York neighborhood. The next minute you’re upstairs in this comfortable but moody space.” And how did they achieve that? “We look for vintage pieces because they have a lot of character,” Evan says, adding, “Some people would have removed the patina. We embraced it.”
