The ‘sparse abundance’ of Ippolita Rostagno’s Brooklyn home
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When the din of Seventh Avenue falls silent and all you can hear are the pigeons, you know you have arrived at the 19th-century home of Italian jewellery designer Ippolita Rostagno. A jumble of worn sneakers in the vestibule face the stoop with its tidy patio. Passing by, moneyed hipsters, drip coffee in hand, race toward the subway. This is gentrified Park Slope, not the storied slums of the late writer Pete Hamill, but all it takes is a stroll down Park Place to recapture that old-world feeling.
“I felt this was the only place I could live a more genteel existence in New York,” says Rostagno, whose devotion to preserving Italian craftsmanship led her to co-found the online home-decor destination Artemest in 2015 with Italian entrepreneur Marco Credendino. Its first bricks and mortar gallery, Artemest Galleria, which she opened in 2022 on West 19th Street, offers a tantalising array of handmade pieces, sourced through the creative director’s frequent expeditions abroad.
This month, as part of NYC Design Week, the galleria, which feels like a Milanese villa with its Venetian stucco and lime-finished walls, is opening a garden space. Those wandering outdoors will find furniture by Italy’s Dante Negro under lighting by Contardi, with other examples by DMG Fiesole and Forma & Cemento. More galleries are in the works, says Rostagno, who has taken a similarly studied approach to her four-storey brownstone home.
A youthful-looking 60 with curly black hair, Rostagno has lived on Park Place for 24 years. Initially, the designer rented an apartment on the third floor of one address, before taking the lower two floors of another house next door. In 2005, she decided to become a homeowner for real when her neighbour told her she was selling the bottom two floors of her brownstone. “If you’re in the city 24/7, the din is a lot,” says Rostagno. Brooklyn offers her a much-needed respite, as both her jewellery studio and Artemest Galleria are based in the city. “Coming home at night, it’s just: ‘Aaahhh.’”
Built in the late 1800s, the Italianate brownstone, which served as a boarding house in the 1950s, was carved up into separate apartments when Rostagno bought it. It was the victim of many poorly thought-out modifications. “There was nothing design-wise that was worth keeping,” recalls the local architect Alicia Balocco, whom Rostagno employed “to modernise everything” in 2005. She found “a mish-mosh of things, and everything needed to be redone – plumbing, electric…”
The space today looks contemporary, partly due to its loft-like openness and the steel-and-walnut bookshelves, which Rostagno designed and had built by cabinet-maker Benjamin Bajorek. The details honour the building’s original look while meeting the needs of the digital age. She bought the remaining floors in 2009 when her neighbour moved out, and there have been many updates since. Rostagno, who sees design in all its forms as art, is constantly changing the house. “The nicest layout is all open,” Rostagno says, striding toward the sunlit dining area, created by bumping the floor back 10 feet, and the rear garden. It’s a dreary New York winter day, but the garden looks strangely inviting.
Framed by a mature river birch and a linden tree, the space was overrun with Japanese knotweed, says Jesse Terzi, the principal of Brooklyn-based New Eco Landscapes, who spent about six weeks reviving the “old, overgrown garden” with a mix of native plants. In the spring, Rostagno plants lots of annuals, and in the summer the tropical plants come alive. A lifelong nature fanatic who grew up riding horses in the Tuscan countryside, Rostagno, her Italian husband, Leo Amato, 45, and their six-year-old son, Dante, spend a lot of their time outside. “Nine months a year, we have the doors open,” she says, eyeing the brick pizza oven below the trees. “It makes it feel like you’re outside even if you’re in.”
Throughout, Rostagno has confidently layered in touches – Venetian plaster walls, glass candleholders and vintage yellow lamps – that reflect her Italian heritage and passion for all things handmade. Her American mother, a decorative painter who met her Italian husband while studying abroad in Florence, was “a maniacal museum-goer”, says Rostagno, so from a young age she and her older sister Ilaria “were living and breathing art”.
“Because I’m a craft maniac, I wanted to include as many crafty things as I could,” she says of her interior choices, inspecting a new-found chip on the ceramic-tile frieze by Italian artist Giovanni Vettori – one of many Rostagno commissions dotted throughout the living room. Behind us, an enormous Kiki Smith collage of Rostagno and her adult daughter, Maya, hangs above a sleek Cassina sofa found on Artemest.
As we climb the steel stairs, Rostagno explains the nightmare that ensued when the architect Robin Elmslie Osler, principal and creative director at Arcadis, began to renovate the upper floors. When they removed the original stairwell, which was “rickety and falling down”, the third floor collapsed. Never one to let good material go to waste, Rostagno saved an original wood beam and repurposed it into a low shelf that now sits in her bedroom. That shelf – along with the exquisite Murano glass chandelier by Striulli Vetri D’Arte, a vibrant acrylic portrait of Rostagno and Amato by Zoe Papini, and a hand-carved walnut armchair by Giuseppe Rivadossi –showcases her flair for intriguing material contrasts.
“Sparse abundance is my aesthetic,” she says matter of factly. “Few things, large spaces, pretty clean – but the details are very rich.” She pauses before the walk-in closet, a jewel-box space made all the more luxurious thanks to its hand-carved metal doors studded with lustrous rock crystal stones commissioned from Rostagno’s lapidarist in Bangkok. “This is very much part of my jewellery vocabulary,” the Ippolita founder says of the doors modelled after her Rock Candy bracelet. She plucks another piece from a stack on her dresser. “This is like a coral reef,” she says, admiringly, of her Reef bangle.
In the studio, the four skylights are the main attraction, but so is Rostagno’s covetable collection of contemporary art. “Things give back to the extent that you notice them,” she says of the pieces carefully arrayed to the left of her extra-long desk, “and the more you observe them, the more you tend to notice – and the more delight you can extract from them.” Deng Shiqing’s oil painting of a woman collapsed on the beach shows a sense of humour, while Zoe Papini’s monochromatic portrait of Dante pulls at your heart. A print by the English artist Harland Miller winks at an old book-buying habit.
Not surprisingly, Rostagno loves entertaining. For years, she’s been serving her dish of choice: braised short ribs in broth, with sautéed leeks and salsa verde. “It takes two days to prepare, but I love cooking it for my extended family, who ask for it regularly,” she says. Like the home she’s created for herself, it’s a speciality.
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