For fashion designer Emily Adams Bode Aujla, the past is always close at hand. History is worn on the sleeve, a way to tell a story through objects. A collection for her eponymous line, which she launched in 2016, may incorporate a particular kind of embroidery or a textile pattern specific to another decade or from another century. She might use a men’s collar that resembles a shirt the great Bengali film-maker Satyajit Ray once wore. Or she might work with colours that look like they’re wrung from a summer spent on Cape Cod in the 1970s: faded mustard, moss green, dirty pink.
Nothing, however, is ever made as a direct facsimile; her clothes aren’t faithful reproductions or costumes. ‘It’s not even that you’re not in 2023,’ she explains during a recent afternoon visit. ‘It’s just that you’re not in a specific era at all. It’s way more timeless than that. Maybe you’re not in today, but you’re also not in 1920.’ The same philosophy can be applied to her apartment in Manhattan’s West Village, which she shares with her husband, frequent collaborator and muse, the furniture-maker Aaron Aujla (who coruns the independent design studio Green River Project LLC with his business partner Benjamin Bloomstein). As new parents, the duo had outgrown their Chinatown rental, which had become part of their small but influential empire on the Lower East Side that included several shopfronts (a Bode men’s store, a tailoring shop, a coffeehouse and a bar called The River).
But the proximity to their work had meant no privacy or time for just themselves. ‘If I took our dog for a walk, I’d run into five customers,’ Emily says. The couple now occupy the top two floors of a brick Federal-style terrace house that was first erected in 1825, shortly after Washington Square Park was turned from a potter’s field into a marching ground. True to themselves, Emily and Aaron have already researched the building’s history, which, like much of the neighbourhood, is rich and varied. Kate Moss and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy were once residents. Before that, it was owned by the playwright Lorraine Hansberry after the success of A Raisin in the Sun in the 1950s. But Emily and Aaron are particularly inspired by the life of the painter Everett Shinn, who began renting the place at the turn of the 20th century.
Shinn was a member of the Ashcan School, an artistic movement dedicated to depicting scenes of urban life. With rakish good looks, he is believed to have been the inspiration for Theodore Dreiser’s 1915 novel The Genius, about an artist who struggles to control his sexual impulses against the backdrop of a puritanical American society. Emily and Adam see a kinship between his work and theirs. They admire his multidisciplinary skills (he dabbled in theatre, architecture and interiors) – so much so that they recently purchased a floral still life by Shinn that now anchors a corner of the living room, and Emily is contemplating possibly creating a collection around him. Much of the apartment’s features dating from the period of Shinn’s occupancy, however, had disappeared in more recent renovations.
One of the first changes that Aaron made was to knock down its existing cabinetry and walls, thus opening up the space. He remodelled the kitchen, remaking the cabinets in all-black Formica with silver hinges. ‘I was imagining the kitchen looking like it was renovated, but in the 1980s or something,’ he said. The kitchen sits opposite a custom dining table, made out of cherry wood, with a chiselled groove along its surface meant to mimic the winding curves of the Green River in upstate New York after which his and Bloomstein’s studio practice is named. He also insisted on painting all of the apartment’s walls and ceilings a bright robin’s-egg blue, a signature hue of Madeleine Castaing with which Aaron became enamoured after a trip to Paris, when the couple came close to leasing a Bode shop in a photography store owned by the interior decorator’s grandson. ‘When I painted them, Emily was like, “Every wall? Every ceiling?’” he says. ‘But after I did it, she said: “All right.”
Collaborating with Emily is cool because there are certain things that are non-negotiable, and then there are others where she completely trusts me.’ Smaller material touches echo the colour choices while also providing a portal into another moment in time. Over the windows, and across the beam that separates the dining area from the living room, Emily has hung antique textiles she has collected in the form of floral curtains in various shades of Prussian blue. They’re all from the mid-19th century, when Shinn would have been a small boy or a twinkle in his parents’ eyes. She has even, in her research of him, come across a portrait he painted of his wife in which the background walls are the same turquoise.
Upstairs, the northerly windows of the principal bedroom (1910s additions made in an attempt to modernise the building’s brick façade) face the upper branches of several honey locust trees. Hanging behind the bed and mirroring their yellowing leaves is a mustard fabric from the New York World’s Fair in 1939. It matches the couch and two Art Deco-style armchairs made by Green River Project LLC, which are upholstered in a yellow silk that Emily used in a past collection. But the room that seems to represent the most change in the couple’s life is the baby’s.
In it, an embroidered daybed faces a wicker bassinet, which is draped with an antique lace skirt and hood. The windows overlook the playhouse that Shinn built in the property’s back garden over a century ago. Emily is obsessed with labelling the infant’s clothing, sorting through family heirlooms, and vintage or antique pieces that she has collected over the decades. After all, this moment marks a new chapter in the couple’s lives – when their family histories are now permanently joined. ‘My mom saved all our childhood clothes,’ she says. ‘I always found clothing and objects – especially from past generations – incredibly inspiring to me. I know not everybody feels that way, but that was what drove me.’
A version of this article appears in the March 2024 issue of The World of Interiors. Learn about our subscription offers
