GEM OF A PLACE

A jewelry designer and an architect transform their Manhattan apartment with dazzling color and pattern.

- Jill Newman

Known for his candy-colored baubles and his equally vibrant sartorial style, the jewelry designer Mish Tworkowski likes to drench his universe in color. Not surprisingly, the newly renovated Greenwich Village apartment that he shares with his partner in life and business, architect Joseph Singer, reflects that same playfulness and joie de vivre.

"We are not afraid of color," says the designer, whose brand is Mish Fine Jewelry.

Tworkowski purchased the prewar apartment in 2004.

"It was love at first sight," he says of the two-bedroom unit in a building whose style is described as neo-Renaissance.

He loved the quirky character of the space, which has soaring double-height rooms with coffered ceilings and a narrow staircase leading upstairs to the bedrooms. "It felt like a miniature version of a grand English apartment," he says.

He and Singer lived there full-time until 2021, when they decamped to Palm Beach and moved the Mish store, formerly in downtown Manhattan, to a 1920s-era Addison Mizner building. He enlisted his longtime friend, ELLE DECOR A-List interior designer Katie Ridder, to transform the shop into a very Mish-like backdrop. Now painted in his signature lavender and layered with pattern, the space is a merry showcase for Tworkowski's nature-inspired jewels, like gold sea urchin earrings with turquoise drops and bark-textured gold cuffs sprinkled with diamonds.