It's a sunny, unseasonably warm morning in early March and Amiga, Mark Grattan’s Himalayan cat, is vibing. One moment, she’s splayed across the marquetry top of the dining table. Another, she’s nuzzling against the plush pile of a moiré-patterned rug or bounding across the platform bed, the lacquered frame of which appears to melt into the floor. “It’s her apartment,” Grattan says. True. But it’s his world. On the top floor of a Brooklyn brownstone, the iconoclast has realized an immersive feat of contemporary design – and by hand no less.
He wasn’t expecting to live here. In the midst of the pandemic, Grattan and Amiga were residing in Mexico City – he creating furniture under his former label VIDIVIXI – when Solange Knowles tapped him to develop products for her multidisciplinary platform Saint Heron. That brought him back to the Big Apple, where he had previously studied furniture design at Pratt, for what was meant to be a six-month stint. One thing led to another. Suddenly he had rented a woodshop. Suddenly Amiga had flown north to join him. Suddenly it had been two years. “You know how shit goes,” says Grattan. “Time passed so fast. Unintentionally, I was re-creating a life in New York.” Along the way, he tired of Airbnbs and sublets, prompting a citywide apartment search. “I was looking for someplace that had versatility, someplace that I could change,” recalls the designer, ever the industrious Capricorn. He eventually found it in Bedford-Stuyvesant, not far from his alma mater.
