Gina Alvarez and Stefan Boublil are storytellers. The couple, cofounders of New York City design agency The Apartment, delve into clients' lives, grilling them about their routines, their travels, and their desires, then figure out how to translate the insights into livable 3-D spaces. But when it came to designing their own place—they bought their SoHo loft in 1999, before having kids—the process was less rigorous, more improvised. "There were two things I really wanted in life—a swing and a slide," says Boublil, 38, only half jokingly: Now a metal swing hangs from the living-room ceiling (he's still hoping for that slide).
When their son, Zoel (a.k.a. Zo, now 5), and daughter, Leeloo (now 16 months), came along, the space just continued to evolve, becoming a playful, ever-morphing mixture of kids' things, IKEA standbys, and high-design pieces, many of which came from the shop the couple used to run. Before The Apartment became the design engine it is today (it handles branding, interior design, and architecture), it was a furniture-and-housewares store that was laid out like an apartment. Everything was for sale, from the bed to the sandwiches in the refrigerator to the refrigerator itself. Customers were encouraged to linger. "You could come take a nap if you wanted to," says Boublil. It was retail as theater.
These days, home is where the drama takes place. As Leeloo stacks blocks and demolishes them, Zo, dressed in a policeman's hat, chases bad guys. Their parents, meanwhile, alternate between French, Spanish, and English as they speak to them (Boublil grew up in Paris; Alvarez, 37, is Cuban-American). Boublil points out that their loft "is essentially a two-bedroom," albeit one with a supersize living space divided into four quadrants. There's the main seating area, which includes Boublil's collection of racy French cartoons and, on the far side of what the family refers to as "the garden" (because of the Oscar the Grouch–green shag rug), a fireplace and a regal Louis XIV chair upholstered in pink silk.
Across the room is the home theater, where three unobtrusive speakers mounted onto the brick wall face an extradeep sofa and a projector. When it's showtime—sometimes they'll watch a cartoon from Boublil's assortment of Looney Tunes classics, and Zo recently saw Star Wars for the first time—a screen unfurls from the ceiling.
The loft's epicenter is the kitchen-dining space, which features a long table for 12 to accommodate frequent dinner parties. Guests or no guests, the family tries to eat dinner together every night, which means that the hours between 6 and 8 p.m. are, says Alvarez, "crazy." Most meals are prepared with Zo as sous-chef—especially when the menu includes "Grinch soup," a concoction of only-green vegetables.
In the fourth quadrant is the kids' space. Since this play "room" is right between the kitchen and the main seating area, Alvarez and Boublil can always keep tabs on the children without hovering over them. Getting used to lots of toys in the living space, rather than relegating them to the kids' shared bedroom, however, has taken some adjustment. "We fought with that a little," Boublil admits. "But it's more important for the kids to be here and in the mix."
Also, "it's Zo's personality," Alvarez adds. "He loves adults and adult conversation more than he likes to be in his room with his toys. He talks about our friends like they're his."
Many of the furnishings and artworks throughout the loft have pedigrees—even in the kids' bedroom, where the couple have hung an Ingo Maurer chandelier and a Stephane Barroux painting of a slightly menacing face. But Alvarez and Boublil aren't precious about their possessions. No one flinched, for instance, when Leeloo took a crayon to the Marcel Breuer nesting tables. "We created The Apartment so that people would become comfortable with design," Boublil says. "We didn't want to worship it."
After their family grew to four, Alvarez and Boublil considered moving so that each of their children could have a room. They even bought a 7,000-square-foot space in an old YMCA building and turned what had formerly been the basketball courts into a majestic triplex. But they ended up deciding to sell it and stay where they were. Surveying the loft, Boublil acknowledges that the place tells a story he had never thought of. "If I had planned this space, it would have been more streamlined—more monochromatic," he says. "But this is a lot more like life."
