Colin King Trades Tribeca Minimalism for a Layered Chelsea Aerie

By Marcus Bennett

Colin King has moved from a Tribeca loft to an 11th-floor apartment in a 1930 Chelsea building, and the change is total. Casement windows and a generous terrace open onto rooftop views. The bed is made with military-tight corners. The rocks he collected since childhood sit packed away.

"Every time people visit they'll say, Wow, so different for you," King said. "But this side of me was always there."

King is a creative polyglot and artistic director at large of Beni, the rug company. His former Tribeca loft, with limewashed walls and a spare mix of furnishings, appeared on the cover of Architectural Digest in November 2022. It became the cover of his hit 2023 monograph, Arranging Things. The book made his name. It also boxed him in.

"I got placed in a beige box," King said. Because the loft doubled as his office, "it never totally felt like home." He wanted a prewar warren of cozy rooms, with a fireplace, outdoor space, and a division of life and work. "I needed to express myself differently."

How did the rugs shape the apartment?

The old apartment was about "stripping it back." The new one layers from the ground up. It started, King explained, with Beni's new Chelsea collection, handwoven by Moroccan artisans using a technique historically reserved for royal palaces. Each 8-by-10-foot rug carries more than a million knots.

"This construction let us try things we never could before," King said of the dense pile. Motifs run intricate and curvilinear, from framed medallions to fields of leaves, vines, and blooms. "I had never been a shoes-off guy, but now I have to be—they're too beautiful."

What role does the art play?

Art came second as a guiding force. With adviser Joe Sheftel, to whom Ryan Murphy introduced him, King spent two years buying moody paintings by Nate Antolik, Nicholas Bierk, Dominique Knowles, and Kate Spencer Stewart, among other contemporary talents. A 2025 John Kelly self-portrait, modeled after Caravaggio's The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, hangs against the bedroom's 19th-century Coromandel screen. In the den, where King reads, hangs a circa 1890 Henri Fantin-Latour canvas of three nymphs.

"Someone recently asked me if, given the choice, I would want 10 incredible pieces of furniture or one great piece of art—I said art," King said. "That to me is more of a lifelong commitment."

The furniture is formidable anyway. A Pierre Jeanneret desk meets an Egyptian Revival candelabra. Joe D'Urso cocktail tables face an altar-like console. Lighting runs from Jasper Morrison floor lamps to a Fortuny pendant. Antique vessels by Christofle, Tiffany Studios, and Josef Hoffmann mix with King's own designs for Zara Home and Audo Copenhagen.

Has he really left the beige box?

Not entirely. Walls wear Farrow & Ball's Slipper Satin or sisal paper. But King frames the apartment as a work in progress rather than a finished statement.

"As I figure out the next chapter of my career, home will be an experiment," he said. He has never lived above the third floor before. "The light up here is incredible."

The story appears in the November issue of AD. For King, the aerie is both a fresh start and a public test of how far his eye can travel from the spare loft that made him famous.