Star Quality

For Television Hit Maker Darren Star, Lee F. Mindel Designs a Serene New York Loft With Urbane Flair.

- Jesse Kornbluth

NETWORK AND STUDIO EXECUTIVES HEAR 500 pitches a year. Maybe a dozen make it to your screens. Those are terrible odds. But not for Darren Star. In 1990, he launched Beverly Hills, 90210, a prime-time soap opera about teenagers who create a kind of family. He followed that with Melrose Place, about another self-created family, this time of young adults. Then he introduced Sex and the City, the first series to showcase unmarried career women who lean on one another, not on men. Along the way, he became an icon: a writer who invented a genre.

At first glance, Star’s longtime friend Lee F. Mindel has designed a Manhattan loft in a discreet building just off lower Fifth Avenue that looks more like an urban retreat for a monk than the New York City base of a media impresario. It reads as a rhapsody in white and gray: brick walls, as Mindel puts it, “limed to create a veil of lightness,” freestanding millwork room dividers that look like “floating sculptures,” unadorned windows that celebrate the neighboring buildings and fire escapes and serve, as Mindel says, as “framed urban art spaces.”

For a man who owns exuberant art and dramatic furniture in the residences he keeps in Los Angeles and the Hamptons, Star’s New York loft is a whisper. Awards? On a shelf in his library in Los Angeles. As he observes, “Here, even the brick is quiet.”