色彩斑斓的创意空间 | 设计师 Madelynn Ringo 的布鲁克林公寓

Welcome to Room Envy, a series where we ask interesting people about a favorite room in their house. From minimalist living rooms to vibrant kitchens, we’re zeroing in on the best features of the most enviable rooms.

Architectural designer Madelynn Ringo has helped conceptualize some of the buzziest retail spaces and exhibits in New York City—from Glossier and Bala to the Museum of Ice Cream—with millennial-friendly, endlessly Instagrammable interiors that make people want to stay and browse for awhile. When it came to outfitting her Brooklyn studio apartment with sweeping views of the Williamsburg waterfront, the founder and creative director of Ringo Studios similarly had to think outside the box with vibrant color schemes, floor-to-ceiling mirrors, and foldable midcentury-modern furniture to fill the 350-square-foot space.

Creating one functional live-work area in such a small space certainly had its limitations. For starters, there’s no couch. “I’ve been living in New York for three years now without one, which is very interesting,” she adds. Tight spaces can also easily collect clutter, so Madelynn maximized her wall space with a 12-foot-long wardrobe system that runs the length of the main room, concealed with custom linen drapery. Taking a page from her retail design book, she even infused her apartment with color and pizazz in the form of vibrant hue lights—plus a hanging mirror ball pendant—that transform living here into its own “capital E” Experience.

A portrait of Madelynn inside her Brooklyn studio apartment. Photo: Ringo Studio

Coming from an architectural background, Madelynn “always wanted to try doing my own thing and pushing the boundaries of what a degree in architecture could provide as a creative profession.” Now she notes that she’s still doing the same problem solving, spatial thinking, and narrative building, except through the lens of a brand. As a nod to her fellow architecture school grads with passions beyond the job, she also displays a collection of visual art from friends and colleagues that have trained as architects but have since explored other mediums.

The biggest headache of all with setting up the tight-knit space were the two floor-length mirrors that Madelynn installed on either side of two nine-foot tall windows—sans contractor—to play off light reflections from the broad windows and create the illusion of having a corner unit. “I thought to myself, ‘I install mirrors in stores all the time. This is no big deal,’” she recalls. Six backbreaking hours later of getting the piece of glass in the door, installing Z clips to maintain the shape, and securing each piece on the wall, they were finally in place. “It was a very wild process that nearly killed me, but they’ve made it for three years, so there you go,” she laughs.

Colorful hue lights and art pieces mingle with vintage furniture, like this midcentury credenza. Photo: Ringo Studio

Location: Brooklyn, New York

Square footage: 350 square feet

AD: How have you incorporated the storytelling elements of your work within your Brooklyn studio apartment?

Madelynn Ringo: Color is really important to me in our work projects, and I think that definitely comes out in my apartment. I’m looking around and there’s nearly every color possible in here. My studio is very small, and there’s only a single room, so everything has to speak to each other, like the bed and the kitchen table, and then the art piece on the wall. My bed is in this deep terra-cotta tone, which is playing off of the midcentury-modern table, but it also matches the orange tones of painting above the bed. And fun accents like the glass vases or hue lights definitely add little hints of color throughout the space.

Was there a particular vibe you were going for with your space? 

There was definitely this goal of being able to have things be very serene even though we’re operating in a very small space. I knew that the space was going to be pretty small and that clutter was going to be a problem. If your space is cluttered or messy, it’s hard to have clarity in your creative thinking process. So a lot of the design was thinking about the layout and really trying to kind of minimize and simplify and keep everything tucked away.

A vintage lazy Susan complements the midcentury-modern drop leaf dining table beneath it.  Photo: Ringo Studio

Do you have any favorite pieces? 

This table was the very first thing I bought, and that was from Dobbins St. Co-op. It’s a fold-down design because I thought that since the house is very small, all of the furniture needed to be able to fold down and become more compact. So this table completely folds into itself and stores four folding chairs. I’ve also got a credenza, which I store all my material samples in, like tiles or textures or fabrics so I can grab them easily if I’m on a Zoom call with a client or making a little mood board on the table. Something that I’ve always done—which I think is reminiscent of being in architecture school or having a studio with a large desk—is gather things that are inspirational or objects that remind me of a feeling, or compositions of things in my peripheral view. My house certainly has some of those little elements and clusters of materials.

Tell me more about your collection of art.

When I started bringing art into the space, I began with my friends from graduate school. I have a painting by a friend, Christian Golden, who does these beautiful abstract-like shapes. The one behind me is from another grad school colleague, Robert Hon. I had this idea when I was starting to collect artwork that I would always purchase artwork from architects who had then moved away from architecture and had started exploring creativity in a different way, so those two paintings fall in line with that. And then, one of my best friends from graduate school, Dima Srouji, makes these beautiful, playful glass objects. I have six of them, and I shuffle them around in different places as I’m changing things up.

Madelynn likes to keep small clusters of material samples nearby as visual inspiration while she works. Photo: Ringo Studio