These Lighting Designers Combine Madonna and Peggy Guggenheim
The long-shuttered RKO Hamilton Theater at 146th Street and Broadway in Harlem is not a place you’d expect to find Hamish Bowles or Linda Fargo or Lindsey Adelman on a Saturday night.
But in May they had UberBlacked their way to upper Manhattan to join a festive throng of bleedingly hip architects, buttoned-up interior designers, and resplendent club kids at what has become a must-attend bacchanal, the annual party thrown by the decadently flush lighting and luxury furniture house Apparatus.
This year’s party was bigger than ever: a one-night-only event that manifested inside a graffiti-splattered movie palace built in 1913 that had been found by a TV location scout. At 11:30 the music swelled, and The Late Show’s Gospel Choir appeared at the lip of the balcony. As it steamrolled through a Larry Levan remix of “Stand on the Word,” there was rustle of panic, a fear that all this bouncing and swaying might just cause the romantically decrepit balcony to collapse, crushing us all in fabulousness.
But instead of tragedy it was another improbable, cost-is-apparently-no-object success for Apparatus’s founders, the husband-and-husband team of Gabriel Hendifar, 38, and Jeremy Anderson, 43.
Over the past decade their meticulously patinated creations, with such bespoke details as silk cords and glowing Chinese porcelain, have disrupted the staid and corporatized lighting fixtures world.
“I remember going to their showroom for the first time and thinking, ‘Oh my god, they get a kind of luxury and spareness no one else does,” says Wendy Goodman, New York magazine’s design editor. “You wanted to live in their world: pared down and sexy and elegant. There was nothing mingy or minimalist about their aesthetic. It was luxurious without being effusive.”
L E G E N D A R Y . @apparatusstudio | #INTERLUDE
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Or, as the interior designer Jamie Drake (who was at the uptown party) tells me, Apparatus’s products have a “keen sense of historicism mined to fashion utterly new delights.” But it was the Apparatus boys themselves who seduced him. “Their carefully selected wardrobe sometimes borders on the louche, but always in the most delectable way. Always balanced and swoon-inducing, like their designs,” Drake says. The interior designer Kelly Behun describes them as “a younger, male, and more ripped version of Gertrude Stein, with ’90s Madonna and some Peggy Guggenheim thrown in.”
To think of Apparatus as just another place for your decorator to pick up a $12,800 pendant lamp made out of horsehair, brass, and etched glass, or a $14,800 brass and marble table designed to “evoke nomadic tray tables,” is to misunderstand the importance, for its founders, of such soignée grandeur.
When Goodman saw some of their new furniture in Milan earlier this year (one of the cabinets is made of “hand-dyed eel skin” and “Carpathian elm burl”) she gasped at the craftsmanship. “You didn’t think that kind of work existed anymore,” she recalls thinking. “Like something from a Renaissance atelier.”
“It’s all about the object, and creating the narrative that supports and propels that object,” says Hendifar, the company’s flirty, freewheeling creative director when we meet at Apparatus’s high-ceilinged (and exquisitely lit) HQ. “It’s all creating artifacts of the future, essentially.”
Maybe that sounds a bit haughty, but anyone who has spent any time around fashion designers can recognize that brand of self-mythology. And, like a couture house, “we are making things for people who have access to everything and who have seen everything,” Hendifar says. “What is that moment of desire? What is that moment when an object tells you something about yourself that you either want to believe or already know, and you have to sort of absorb it into your life?”
On one side of Hendifar is a horsehair pendant lamp, which, like much of what Apparatus sells, looks more like jewelry for giants than home decor. On the other side is Anderson, giving off a more practical energy. They call each other “monkey” (that would be Hendifar) and “squirrel” and wear matching gold coins on chains around their necks, gifts from Hendifar’s mother (his parents fled to Los Angeles in 1979, after the Iranian revolution). Anderson, who grew up in Minneapolis, was working in corporate communications in L.A. when he met Hendifar online.
Hendifar, who has a tattoo on his forearm that reads leap, always wanted to be an interior designer. He grew up surrounded by what he calls a “Persian immigrant aesthetic. You’d have an ornate Louis XV living room, and you’d have an Italian lacquered dining room, and all of this on Persian rugs with crystal chandeliers.” During 12th grade he designed “the most expensive set the school had ever built” for a production of Guys and Dolls. The mother of one of his friends was impressed and asked him to help decorate her house. “I was playing interior designer as an 18-year-old,” he says. “And billing her.”
At UCLA he studied costume and scenic design, but eventually he fell into women’s fashion, where he had some success, before the 2008 financial crisis. “It was where I started to learn to dream—and to dream in complete visions, in complete environments, imagining what people are wearing, what they’re saying, what room they’re in, and what the light is like,” he says.
Apparatus started out as a way to solve a nesting dilemma: He and Anderson had just moved in together and, while decorating, found their lighting options distinctly meh. “I thought, Let’s make some lights. And I remember Jeremy looked at me like I had two heads,” Hendifar says. “Then we started tinkering.” Friends liked what they made, they started selling them, they moved to New York, and their business took off.
Every year, in addition to the party, Apparatus makes a short film. The latest, Interlude, follows a couple of shlubby handymen working in what appears to be the lounge of an opera house, carting away the latest Apparatus collection. The whole time Maria Callas is singing “Ardon gli Incensi,” the mad aria from Lucia di Lammermoor. If that seems like too much religious and erotic baggage to hang on a pricey lamp, Hendifar and Anderson know that, in luxury, window dressing matters as much as the goods, especially in the Instagram era. “I don’t believe in the thing until I’ve seen it in a photograph,” Anderson says.
But nobody spends the kind of money Apparatus lays out on promotion without offering a suitably opulent real-life experience, too. Which is why they have opened deliriously high-polish showrooms in New York, Los Angeles, and Milan—and why they throw those parties.
“It’s not a marketing-driven event,” Hendifar says. “Certainly, we hope that people will come and talk about it and enjoy themselves. If you give people a reason to dress and bring their best selves and their joy and their wonder—”
“—and a fantasy for a night,” Anderson says. “One of the amazing reasons we get to do this is because we don’t have to answer to anybody. If we want to have a ridiculous party, we can.”
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