May 4, 2025One eye-catching wall speaks volumes about Lauren Garrett’s uncommon approach to a loft in Manhattan’s Flatiron District. Laced with criss-crossing plumbing pipes, some straight, some curvy, the lot of them unabashedly punctuated by an electrical junction box and a disused fire-alarm bell, the wall is utility as art, a strangely beautiful composition in and of itself.
Another designer might well have sheet-rocked over the jumble. But not Garrett, a member of the 2025 1stDibs 50 list of top interiors talents. “The Japanese philosophy of wabi sabi, finding beauty in imperfection, resonates with me,” she says. “This was essentially a full gut renovation. We moved walls, added storage, redid the kitchen and baths and refinished the floors. We definitely had the option to conceal the pipes, but I wanted to lean into the loft aesthetic.” So, she left them as is and just painted them the same color as the wall behind them, a hue she describes as “creamy, milky off-white.”
As this particular wall illustrates, Garrett and her team at New York City’s LP Creative let the loft be what it was. On the second floor of a vintage building, the under-2,000-square-foot space, despite its expanse of floor-to-ceiling windows, “doesn’t get incredible light,” she says. The conventional tack would have been to whitewash the interiors, but instead, Garrett embraced “warm and moody and edgy,” with furnishings and textiles in grounding shades of chocolate brown, deep red and olive.
“There were conversations about painting the exposed brick to make everything light and bright, but I thought it better to leave the rust color, which comes up again in the kitchen palette. It’s modern but earthy, and in tune with existing elements.”
Garrett is entirely self-taught as a designer, but that didn’t stop her from creating unique custom elements throughout the space: kitchen cabinets with reeded-glass doors that “never fully close,” revealing her clients’ collection of ceramics and dishware; a pair of medicine cabinets inspired by Gio Ponti’s famous free-form mirrors; a queen-size wooden daybed draped in cocoa-colored linen; and, encircling the main living area, 27 linear feet of long, low sofa upholstered in olive velvet.
“That was super-important to my clients,” a young couple who love to entertain, Garrett says. “It’s so great to see twenty or thirty people piled on the sofa, lounging.”
Garrett’s forte is sourcing, informed by a superb eye. The loft is kitted out mostly with vintage pieces, ranging widely in period and style but tied together by her distinctive ethos.
“All my projects, whether a beach bungalow in Malibu or an industrial loft in Manhattan, are deeply inspired by their location, but there’s always a similar thread in the sourcing: worn woods, metals with patina,” she says. “I am obsessed with vintage and antique furniture that isn’t overly precious, that looks lived in, that tells a story.”
Garrett furnished the Flatiron loft from scratch, striving, she says, for a “warm, rustic, collected vibe.” She sourced the vast majority of pieces either from 1stDibs dealers or from the inventory of her own Galerie Was, which has a presence on the site and a by-appointment brick-and-mortar location on Broome Street in Soho. As a general rule, she notes, if she doesn’t have something she wants for a project in her own gallery, “I go to 1stDibs to find it. It adds so much dimension to a space to be able to use pieces from Japan or Europe.”
Garrett cofounded Galerie Was two years ago with Allie Fitzpatrick, a personal chef with an abiding interest in design for whom the designer had revamped homes in Tribeca and Bridgehampton.
“Its name pays homage to old things and the way things were,” Garrett says. LP Creative — the initials stand for Lauren Piscione, Garrett’s name before her recent marriage — functions out of the same ground-floor space; it’s what she calls “a synergistic relationship.”
For the Flatiron project, Garrett turned to 1stDibs not only for the set of 1970s leather Cab chairs by Mario Bellini for Cassina but also the custom live-edge table around which those chairs now sit.The site also yielded a French Brutalist side table and a Japanese Meiji period chest of drawers from the early 1900s, both for the primary bedroom, plus the living room’s ca. 1960 Verner Panton leather Bachelor sling chair and its pair of minimalist wall sconces by Charlotte Perriand. In the kitchen, unusual T-back wooden stools from 1stDibs sidle up to an island of blue-gray Pietra Cardosa marble.
More outstanding pieces came straight from Galerie Was. A ca. 1957 teak and red-leather standing screen by Pierre Jeanneret punctuates the space between the living and dining areas. A quirky Orca lamp by contemporary designer Minjae Kim, a Galerie Was exclusive, occupies a ledge behind the sofa, while an antique Japanese cabinet with sliding doors provides extra storage next to the elevator in the loft’s entry.
A native of New York’s Long Island, Garrett was a journalism and communications major at the University of Wisconsin. After college, via a job in fashion PR, she zigzagged into event planning and worked on brand events and private parties for celebrities in Los Angeles, where she lived for 10 years.
That high-powered world eventually took its toll, Garret says. “I got burnt out and had an Eat Pray Love moment, where I stepped away to assess what I wanted. I liked designing events and experiences, but I didn’t like that what we created got trashed the next day. I wanted to create spaces my clients could permanently live in and enjoy.”
Garrett says she started designing interiors “for anybody who would have me.” A big break came in 2021, when she reinvented a Soho home that was featured in Architectural Digest. After that, she was on her way.
Her event-planning past came in handy last summer when she masterminded her own dream wedding at a Tuscan villa to Travis Garrett, a tech entrepreneur. Now relocated to lower Manhattan from L.A., Garrett is feeling settled and satisfied. “My reward is happy feedback from my clients, or even seeing them on Instagram, enjoying the spaces we toiled over together,” she says. “It reminds me I’m doing the right thing.”
