The Abridged Version (continued)
Photo: Peter Murdock
It may be small, but the apartment (with north, south and east exposures) gets large amounts of sunlight. "When you wake up in the morning, the eastern sun is very harsh," says Povero, who, as an architect, pays close attention to such things. "At that time of day, Brooklyn is in silhouette. But then the light gets warmer as the sun moves through the sky," he says. "In the afternoon, there's an hour when it's hidden behind skyscrapers south of the apartment. And then it comes bursting back in. You get a warm glow off the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge, which become redder and redder until the sun finally sets."
Povero needed to tame that light, so he installed white cotton shades in the bedroom and floor-to-ceiling drapes in the living room. (He sees the drapes as fabric pilasters, a subtle hint of classicism.) But he also wanted to celebrate the sun, so he used orange tones that light up as brightly as any of the towers he sees from his windows.
Povero generally adapts color schemes for his projects from successful artworks: "If the colors work together in a piece of art, they'll work together in a room," he says. Here his inspiration was a mural painted for the famed 1925 Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs, the genesis of the art deco movement. "It had all these colors together, the gray and the black and the greens and the little bits of orange," Povero says. Forget the boxy, white apartment Povero did not love at first sight; these days he's living in a brilliantly colored mural.
The apartment, at 860 square feet, has several small closets and one big one, off the bedroom. Povero wanted that closet to be more than just a storage space. After all, the apartment needed another room as badly as it needed space for extra hangers. By building "cubbies" for shoes at shoulder height, he freed up the floor, letting shirts and jackets hang lower than they do in ordinary closets. And that allowed him to use the upper shelves as a kind of gallery. The artifacts on display include Povero's college diploma, a leaded-glass window that he found in a dumpster while attending architecture school, and reminders of his childhood in Fort Worth, Texas. And then there's the mask of himself he wore one Halloween. Jokes Povero, "It is easily the scariest costume I've ever made." Perhaps, but it's also part of an artful arrangement that makes the closet feel as important to the apartment as any room.
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