Residential · Art Advisory · Curation · Original Works

Polished Comfort | Old Town, Chicago

The best residential art programs are built around the people who live in the home, not around what looks good in the abstract. This Old Town project is one of the clearest examples of that principle in practice.

The clients have a deep affinity for Argentina, and that connection became the curatorial anchor for the main living spaces. Two existing paintings by Luciana Levinton, a Buenos Aires-based artist whose work is woven through with the color, geometry, and visual energy of that city and London, were placed into the collection with the specific intention of honoring that relationship. The clients were not afraid of color, and the Levinton works rewarded that openness fully, bringing warmth, vibrancy, and a sense of personal resonance that no generically beautiful painting could have matched.

In the dining area, two works on paper from my Midwestern Haiku Series found exactly the right home. The series is meditative and nature-oriented, expressive without being loud, and the scale and sensibility of the works suited the dining space in a way that felt instinctive rather than calculated. Placing my own work here was a curatorial decision as much as an artistic one.

The staircase was its own project entirely. The client had long dreamed of a salon-style gallery wall running the full height of the stair, and I designed it meticulously from the ground up. The wall combines curated contemporary works with objects and pieces that already belonged to the family, including a drawing by one of their sons and inherited family art. The result is modern and eclectic but deeply considered, a wall that holds the family's history and taste in the same frame without letting either overwhelm the other. Designing something like this requires as much editing as it does selecting. Knowing what to leave out is as important as knowing what to put in.

Together the program adds up to something that feels genuinely inhabited. Not a showroom, not a catalog. A home that knows who lives in it.

Developed in collaboration with Epic Interiors. Photography: Cynthia Lynn Photography.