Colin King Trades a Minimalist Loft for a Manhattan Aerie Brimming With Choice Finds

At Colin King’s new Manhattan apartment, on the 11th floor of a 1930 Chelsea building, casement windows and a generous terrace look out across neighboring rooftops, the city unfolding in a postcard-perfect sweep. It is, in every sense, the most elevated space he has ever called home—filled with choice antiques, vintage treasures, and a growing collection of fine art. Packed away are the rocks he’s collected since childhood. His bed, once artfully tussled, is a feat of military-tight corners. And there is nary a pear (IYKYK) to be found. “Every time people visit they’ll say, Wow, so different for you,” he reflects. “But this side of me was always there.”

The creative polyglot and artistic director at large of Beni had until recently lived in a light-filled Tribeca loft, its limewashed walls a neutral backdrop to a spare mix of furnishings (AD, November 2022). Design lovers know it well as the cover to King’s hit 2023 monograph, Arranging Things. But if that apartment was a calling card, it had also become a pigeonhole. “I got placed in a beige box,” he notes, adding that, because the space doubled as his office, “it never totally felt like home.” When time came to move, King envisioned a prewar warren of cozy rooms, with a fireplace, outdoor space, and an overdue division of life and work. “I needed to express myself differently.”

Whereas his old apartment was all about, in his words, “stripping it back,” his current digs lean into layers from the ground up. “It started with the rugs,” King explains, referring to Beni’s new Chelsea collection, handwoven by expert Moroccan artisans using a painstaking technique historically reserved for royal palaces. “This construction let us try things we never could before,” he says of the dense pile (a million-plus knots per 8-by-10-foot rug). Thus motifs tend toward the intricate and curvilinear, whether framed medallions or a field of leaves, vines, and blooms. “I had never been a shoes-off guy, but now I have to be—they’re too beautiful.”

Art acted as the secondary guiding force. With the help of eagle-eyed adviser Joe Sheftel, to whom he was introduced by Ryan Murphy, King spent the past two years amassing moody paintings by Nate Antolik, Nicholas Bierk, Dominique Knowles, and Kate Spencer Stewart, among other contemporary talents. Displayed against the bedroom’s 19th-century Coromandel screen is a 2025 John Kelly self-portrait modeled after Caravaggio’s The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist. Hung in the den, where King pores over his many books, is a circa 1890 Henri-Fantin Latour canvas of three nymphs. “Someone recently asked me if, given the choice, I would want 10 incredible pieces of furniture or one great piece of art—I said art. That to me is more of a lifelong commitment.”

Of course, his furniture is also fabulous, spanning myriad eras and styles, with leitmotifs of gilding and chinoiserie. Here, a Pierre Jeanneret desk meets an Egyptian Revival candelabra. There, Joe D’Urso cocktail tables face off with an altar-like console. Room to room, lighting ranges from Jasper Morrison floor lamps to a Fortuny pendant, while antique vessels by Christofle, Tiffany Studios, and Joseff Hoffman mingle with King’s own designs for Zara Home or Audo Copenhagen. Underpinning the mix is King’s poetic sense of texture, tone, materiality, and form, every vignette a study in contrasts.

Maybe he hasn’t quite busted out of that beige box: Walls are painted in Farrow & Ball’s Slipper Satin or else covered in sisal paper. But world, how you have misjudged Mr. Colin King, who has more surprises in store for us yet. “As I figure out the next chapter of my career, home will be an experiment,” he says. For now, he’s enjoying the views. “I have never lived above the third floor. The light up here is incredible.”

This story appears in the November issue. Never miss a story when you subscribe to AD.