Inside Colin King’s Light-Filled Manhattan Loft

“Friends joke I’m a mover with an eye,” says King, who surrounds himself at home with tokens from past projects and reminders of his upbringing. The open kitchen’s floating shelves, for instance, display tableware and glassware from Roman and Williams Guild, whose photographic narrative he has helped conceive through recurring shoots. The vast living area, meanwhile, features pieces from other favorite New York City sources, including Gallery Dobrinka Salzman, MDFG, Demisch Danant, and Dienst + Dotter Antikviteter. Rocks add a tectonic leitmotif, appearing as sculptural objects on shelves and sills, as well as the base of his homemade cocktail table. Each harks back to a childhood spent collecting stones, which he would smash open in search of geodes. “I’ve always believed in the mystical power of objects,” King notes, adding, “I’ll always be that kid on the farm at heart.”

Nature, dance, collaboration—all form the foundations of King’s multihyphenate practice, the tenets of which reveal themselves in his Tribeca loft. The narrow palette spans his signature range of neutrals. (“Friends tease I dream in 50 shades of brown.”) Materials tend toward the timeworn, foregrounding texture, imperfection, and age. And those bare windows reflect his fascination with shadow and light, both of which he treats as objects unto themselves.

Most fundamental to King’s broad ethos, however, might be a spirit of trial and error. On set, King often experiments with compositions again and again and again to determine, as he puts it, “what the moment isn’t, until I find what the moment is.” That fumble-forward strategy played out over the course of his renovation. Only after sanding what had been dark-stained floors, for instance, did he discover the beautiful pine. “That was my first Easter egg,” he jokes of the surprise discovery, one of many.