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The fashion designer Phillip Lim spent years perfecting the quintessential New York City artist’s loft, but months of confinement have led him to better appreciate the value of self-expression

- Jessica Iredale.

The fashion designer Phillip Lim moved into his SoHo loft in 2007, originally occupying a one-bedroom flat on the fourth storey of a century-old cast-iron building that is evocative of the quintessentially industrial glam of downtown Manhattan. It’s the kind of place one imagines was previously occupied by all sorts of cool artists in the Seventies and Eighties, when SoHo was the dirt-cheap no-man’s land of New York City lore. On its façade, each storey features six majestic, three-metre-tall arched windows, though Lim’s original flat sadly faced a different direction.

Four years later, when his neighbour offered to sell his street-facing apartment—“an Eighties finance-bro bachelor pad with metal blinds, the bed at a diagonal and one giant TV”, as Lim puts it—the designer snapped it up and combined the two units into a sprawling, light-filled 3,600 sq ft home. The dream loft is the result of an 18-month renovation with architect Joe Nix, the husband of Lim’s senior brand director Maria Vu. “He was just out of school and it was his first commission,” says Lim, who prefers to work with young architects. “The good part is, their minds are so open. I wanted to work with someone who wouldn’t fight me, wouldn’t resist making a home for myself and not in their vision.”

Lim’s vision is all his own, an eclectic mix that feels like an intensely personal collection as opposed to a curated showroom. His eye for design is a natural extension of his career in fashion, but one that has also been carefully cultivated through his enthusiasm for research in other fields.