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Aug 08, 2023

Inside AD100 Designer Andre Mellone’s Elegant Manhattan Home

By Sam Cochran Photography by Stephen Kent Johnson Styled by Michael Reynolds For as long as he can remember, Andre Mellone has been drawing. Growing up in São Paulo, he would spend afternoons

By Sam Cochran

Photography by Stephen Kent Johnson

Styled by Michael Reynolds

For as long as he can remember, Andre Mellone has been drawing. Growing up in São Paulo, he would spend afternoons doodling endless iterations of the same scene: a house, a tree, a dog, and a bird. Later, while living in Italy as an architecture student, he immersed himselfin classical orders through pencil and ink, rendering Roman ruins and Palladian villas in dynamic detail. “Sketching turns something on spiritually,” Mellone reflects during a visit to his new Manhattan apartment, where examples of those early works can be seen framed on the walls. “In order for a project to be successful, I need to draw. It gives a room soul.”

Today, that daily artistic practice forms the foundation of his own AD100 design firm, Studio Mellone. Brainstorming begins on sheets of cheap tracing paper, as Mellone imagines floor plans, furniture, and elevations. Presentations then morph into layered illustrations that blend digitally scanned sketches with spontaneous markups, added on the spot to refine a particular element. Clients thrill to his gifted artistry, among them a who’s who of the art world and fashion brands like The Row, Thom Browne, and Carolina Herrera. But for Mellone, drawing is not just a pitch. It’s a process.

The living room is divided into seating areas anchored by a bespoke sectional and a 1926 Pierre Chareau bed; walls painted in Benjamin Moore’s Dune White.

The fruits of that analog approach reveal themselves fully at his two-story penthouse, set in a Shigeru Ban–designed building, where garage-style window walls pivot and rise to dramatically merge indoors and out. Rigorous yet emotive, the home offers an eloquent study in geometry, with dynamic angles, simple shapes, and the occasional curve.

“I read everything as circles, squares, triangles,” notes Mellone, who cut his historicist teeth at Robert A.M. Stern Architects, Mark Hampton, Ferguson & Shamamian, and Sawyer|Berson before launching his own studio. All around us, elegant lines form a common thread, the furnishings’ strong silhouettes having seemingly been drawn in space—as if by Harold with a purple crayon, or rather Andre with a Prismacolor pen.

Designed by architect Shigeru Ban, the building features window walls that fold up to usher in fresh air; chairs by Green River Project; Donald Judd bench from Salon 94 Design.

Mellone came across the apartment three years ago, in the midst of the pandemic and the aftermath of an amicable breakup. Spanning four bedrooms, four bathrooms, and five terraces, the listing was much more than any one person needed. But he envisioned it not simply as a place for himself but as a pied-à-terre for his extended family, including his mother, his sister and brother-and-law, and their three children. “It’s my home but a home I share constantly,” notes Mellone, adding that the project also represented a chance to explore new ideas free from the constraints of client expectations. “Designing for yourself, you are completely unafraid.”

It took courage to tackle the main room, a very long but relatively skinny volume, with 19-foot ceilings and those pivoting window walls at either end. “I understood right away that what’s most dramatic and most beautiful about the space is also most difficult,” says Mellone, who broke it down into a sequence of intimate seating areas, terminated by the dining area and a bespoke L-shaped sectional. To create an additional anchor between those two vignettes, he chose, of all things, a bed, albeit not just any bed: a 1926 Pierre Chareau beauty clad in amboyna wood. “No one in my family knew what to do with it,” Mellone notes of the heirloom, which had lingered in his sister and brother-in-law’s collection on account of its quirky proportions. Mellone fitted it with a custom mattress (partially upholstered in black leather to encourage people to kick up their feet) and installed rift-red-oak wainscoting along the wall behind it to engage the burl. Come party time, people now pile onto the piece, creating back-to-back conversation areas with adjacent perches.

A vintage drafting table and chair occupies a corner of Mellone’s bedroom, where Jean Prouvé panels hang above a vintage Italian shelf; framed print by Jonas Wood.

Key references include the 1986 film 9½ Weeks, whose sets long ago sparked Mellone’s fascination with Manhattan. “This room reminds me of Mickey Rourke’s apartment,” notes the designer, who refinished his white oak floors in the same deep ebony as that iconic loft. (His 1982 Richard Meier dining set is another direct nod.) A trip to Marfa, Texas,also served as a creative catalyst. Transfixed by the work of Donald Judd, Mellone translated the artist’s signature geometries into his own framework of form and repetition. The living area’s graphic custom carpet takes inspiration from an early painting, the bench from “stack” sculptures, and the irregularly tufted throw pillows from Judd’s nuanced colors and variations. On the main terrace, meanwhile, aluminum planters pay tribute to the 100 untitled works at the Chinati Foundation. Mellone’s homages line up perfectly with the building’s external columns, part of a subtle internal logic that reveals itself gradually.

And the apartment is certainly a blissful place to while away the hours, whether with friends—the window walls open, fresh air floating through the rooms—or alone at night decompressing. “It’s a totally different place depending on the time of day,” says Mellone. “Everything changes with the light.” He still draws, of course, only now at the drafting table in his bedroom, with views of the Chelsea skyline and the Hudson River. For Mellone, it’s all a Big Apple dream come true. “I’ve chosen New York as my home, and that wasn’t an easy decision,” he reflects. “But I’ve always loved what the city represented—industry, excitement, enterprise. I wouldn’t be here if every year it wasn’t getting better.”

Andre Mellone’s Manhattan home appears in AD’s Style issue. Never miss an issue when you subscribe to AD.

Mellone in the stairwell; vintage Francis Jourdain armchair from Magen H Gallery.

The living room is divided into seating areas anchored by a bespoke sectional and a 1926 Pierre Chareau bed; walls painted in Benjamin Moore’s Dune White.

Jean Prouvé panels from Galerie Patrick Seguin hang above the 1926 Pierre Chareau bed.

One seating area groups a custom sofa in the style of Carlo Scarpa, Mies Van der Rohe chairs, a Green River Project stool, and a vintage Joe D’Urso cocktail table.

Mellone painted the walls in Benjamin Moore’s Dune White to match the existing kitchen cabinetry; the faucet is from the Jason Wu for Brizo collection

A vintage pendant by Svend Aage Holm-Sørensen hangs above an original dining set from Richard Meier’s 1982 collection for Knoll, Mellone’s nod to the movie 9½ Weeks; console by Lodovico Acerbis.

Mellone transformed one of the apartment’s four bedrooms into a TV lounge; the sectional is custom, the armchair is vintage Danish, the blinds are by The Shade Store, and the artworks are by Seth Pick.

The upstairs office features a vintage Charles and Ray Eames cocktail table, Green River Project chairs, and artworks by Tom Burr (center) and Matt Connors (rear); blinds by The Shade Store.

Planters in the style of Donald Judd frame a terrace.

Designed by architect Shigeru Ban, the building features window walls that fold up to usher in fresh air; chairs by Green River Project; Donald Judd bench from Salon 94 Design.

On the main terrace, a custom cocktail table and views of the Hudson beyond.

A vintage drafting table and chair occupies a corner of Mellone’s bedroom, where Jean Prouvé panels hang above a vintage Italian shelf; framed print by Jonas Wood.

Isamu Noguchi lamp and Hans Wegner chair in a bathroom.

A painting by Reena Spaulings anchors the upstairs bedroom, which functions as a separate pied-à-terre for visiting family; the bedside tables are Gio Ponti, the reading lamps are Josef Frank, and the sculpture is by Elaine Cameron-Weir.

A grid of artworks by Alex Da Corte in a guest room; the Charlotte Perriand sconces are from Gallery Dobrinka Salzma.

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