Tour the Soothing SoHo Pied-à-Terre That One Designer Created for Her Household
When you frequent a hotel so often that the hotel begins renovating rooms to accommodate you and your family, perhaps it’s time to start looking for your own place. That epiphany is what inspired the Chilean-born, San Francisco–based interior designer Maca Huneeus to search for a Manhattan pied-à-terre back in 2017.
Once the need was realized, Huneeus moved fast, setting her sights on a then new construction bordering SoHo and Tribeca. “It was the natural light and the Gaudi-esque curves that caught my eye,” she admits. But the building’s modern spaces and sculptural aluminum façade couldn’t have been a bigger departure from the “funky, New York City–loft vibe” she’d envisioned. “For one,” she says, “there wasn’t an exposed brick wall anywhere.”
Instead, the 2,700-square-foot apartment had floor-to-ceiling picture windows and curving plaster walls that give the space an unexpected softness. Ultimately, the decision came down to convenience. “I wanted something turnkey that we could start using immediately,” she says. Aside from a few minor updates—trading what she deemed to be excess closet storage for more livable square footage—the family of six was able to gather at their urban retreat in a matter of months.
What the building lacked in old New York character, though, Huneeus planned to make up for in thoughtful design choices. “My philosophy,” she says, “was vintage, vintage, vintage.” The designer leaned heavily into obscure collector’s pieces, pulling an eclectic mix from her international Rolodex of sellers—a Pierre Chapo “Eye” coffee table, Osvaldo Borsani’s Canada chair—and sourcing items on 1stDibs (the Maison Lunel sconce and a Harvey Probber dry bar, for instance). “I just couldn’t imagine putting a lot of ‘new’ in there,” she explains. “It needed soul. These vintage pieces give it that.”
Huneeus comes at her love of vintage authentically. The daughter of a collector and an architect, she spent her weekends as a young child meandering Santiago’s oldest antique haunts (the Galeria Carroza, Taller del Marco) with her mother. “None of my siblings were ever interested in it,” she remembers. “But me, I could go without breakfast, without lunch, without anything. I was already so passionate about design.”
She recalls the first piece she ever truly fell in love with, a painting by Delia Del Carril, the wife of the Chilean poet and diplomat Pablo Neruda, that still hangs in her mother’s living room. “The scale of it is almost overwhelming,” she says of the graphite horse painting that appears to race across a wall. “It’s unforgettable.” Her strong feelings for that painting made her realize she was different from other 12-year-olds. They didn’t share her passion for art and objects or have an eye for recognizing the wonderfully unique.
Decades later, those qualities are the reason clients seek her out: her ability to curate a seemingly disparate mix with ease, to scour the global markets for beautiful pieces by lesser-known designers and artists. In her own space, that meant pairing Finnish lighting by Lisa Johansson-Pape and handwoven textiles from Nepal with art by close friends—always under the guise of livability. “My family is a shoes-off, feet-on-the-furniture sort of family,” she laughs. “When we’re here, we like to hang out, lounge, be together. Everything about this apartment facilitates that.”
