April 2, 2023Sasha Adler’s first love was fashion. As a child, her style icon was Madonna (“I dressed as her for several Halloweens”), and she later worked for a French wedding magazine. Even today, in her work as an interior designer, she regularly looks to the world of clothing for inspiration.
“I’m constantly referencing details and elements I’ve seen on the runway,” she says. A case in point can be found in the living room of a new-build family home in Chicago’s hip Bucktown district by local firm Massey Associates Architects whose interiors she designed. In front of the fireplace stands a bespoke angular, green ottoman with a horizontal brass band around it. “I spotted a brass belt that cinched at the waist and thought it would be really pretty to create a similar effect with a piece of furniture,” she says.
Adler was raised in the Windy City and segued into interior design on her return there in 2003. She was hired as an assistant at Nate Berkus Associates, where she ended up staying for 14 years, most of it as Berkus’s co-design director. Before a friend told her about the opening in his office, she claims, she had never particularly considered a career in interior decor. Still, looking back to her childhood, she realizes she always had a subliminal interest in the home. As a 10-year-old, she asked for new bedding for her birthday. “My friends all wanted clothes or toys,” she notes. And in her teens, when her parents were renovating a new house, “I became completely obsessed with the process and wanted to go to the meetings with my mom,” she recounts. “In retrospect, I must have been a nightmare for the interior designer, because I was very specific: I wanted grasscloth on the walls and thought my window treatments should be striped.”
She founded her own firm in June 2018 with three employees. Within just four months, the team had grown to nine, working on some 15 projects. Since then, she’s completed not only residential commissions in destinations like Mexico, Puerto Rico and the Hamptons but also a private plane, as well as stores for Gwyneth Paltrow’s goop brand in Chicago and Austin.
The Bucktown home, which has its own rooftop pool, was for a young family with four children. “They entertain frequently and really wanted to create a fun environment,” Adler says of the clients, whom she describes as having “a lot of energy.” They were also looking for something a little different. “They were drawn toward unique pieces,” she continues. “They didn’t want things they would see in all of their friends’ homes.” And it was important that the home reflect their personalities. “People wandering through it really get an idea of who they are and what they’re interested in.”
The children, for instance, are very into music. So, Adler created a music room that is home not only to a whole host of different instruments but also a collection of vintage concert posters. The wife’s major in college, meanwhile, was entomology, and when Adler came across a series of vases in the shape of beetles by Dutch designer Thomas Eyck, she decided to mount them on the powder-room wall like an art installation.
Adler particularly likes working with clients who have preexisting collections. “There’s a sentimental value to them,” she says. Here, the wife had a number of pieces of 1970s design from her childhood home, among them a floor lamp with a red marble shade and a snake wrapped around it, which Adler placed in the living room. A pair of Warren Platner chairs with their original mohair upholstery takes center stage in the dining room, which was conceived to serve a number of functions. “It’s not only used for formal meals but also to have pizza on Friday night or to sit and have a drink and play music,” says Adler.
The family can do the last thanks to the turntable on the custom bar, which was created by adapting a 19th-century French wooden credenza. “The clients’ tastes are more modern, but I love having a piece that has real patina and signs of wear,” says Adler. Similar aged charm can be found in the living room, where the inside of an 18th-century fireplace has been lined with reclaimed Belgian roof tiles in what Adler calls a “library pattern,” explaining, “It resembles books stacked on a shelf.”
Integrating vintage items is a signature of her projects, as is introducing pops of color. Another constant is the use of intriguing light fixtures. “I think they can really function as artwork,” she says. This home is no exception. In the study is a custom chandelier based on one that got away. “I came across a vintage fixture at the market in Paris years ago,” she recounts. “It was one of those pieces I wish I’d bought and didn’t. But I had a photo of it on my phone.”
The monotony of the long hallway was broken up by a lot of interesting lighting designs. “They help to create different moments so it doesn’t feel never-ending,” says Adler. “As you progress, the story develops.” Among the fixtures are a reproduction Josef Hoffmann chandelier from Woka Gallery, in Vienna, and a pair of oversize brass sconces sourced at the Galerie Glustin, in Paris. Perhaps the best find, however, was a set of Murano glass wall lights, also unearthed in the French capital. “We needed six, and we happened upon six, which was fortuitous,” relates Adler. “The scale and texture were perfect too. It’s like they were meant to be in the house.”
