In the 1960s, the artist Stephen Antonakos transformed his SoHo apartment into what one observer has called a kaleidoscopic fever dream. The medium driving that transformation was neon — a material the Greek-born artist had discovered and, by his own demonstrated commitment, come to love deeply.

Antonakos did not keep his home and his work separate. His SoHo living space doubled as a laboratory for colored light, its rooms reframed by tubes that turned domestic architecture into an immersive environment. In an era when his downtown Manhattan neighbors were experimenting with Minimalism, Pop and Conceptual art, Antonakos committed himself to neon as a fine-art material — and he lived inside the results.

The apartment's transformation in the 1960s marks a decisive moment in the artist's career. Having developed what sources close to his practice describe as a deep affection for the material, Antonakos moved neon out of the realm of commercial signage and into the space of the home, the gallery and, eventually, art history.

The SoHo apartment itself — a neighborhood that in the 1960s was becoming the epicenter of New York's art world — functioned as both residence and statement. To walk into it, according to the account of the space, was to enter a kaleidoscope: walls, corners and air rendered in shifting color by bent glass tubing.

That domestic experiment anticipated the public commissions and museum installations for which Antonakos would later become known. It also raises a question his apartment answered in practice: whether art needs a white cube at all. Antonakos's home proved it did not — the rooms he lit in the 1960s remain an early, radical argument for neon's place in art.