A call of “Help! What do I do?” was the rallying cry that brought together the American fashion designer and philanthropist Kay Unger and AD100 Hall of Fame interior designer Jamie Drake for not only a reinvention of her classic SoHo loft, but a pivotal perspective shift. A burst pipe and 24 hours of flooding had buckled the floors of her almost 4,900 square foot apartment and seeped up the walls. In the face of disaster the friends, both alums of Parsons School of Design and board members, decided to see the calamity as a positive.
“Kay is one of the most optimistic people I have ever met,” says Drake. “She can look at the blackest hole and see light inside of it.” And indeed, they both recognized the sizable silver lining. “When Kay said, ‘disaster,’ I saw opportunity,” Drake says. “Kay had lived in this apartment since 2004, and there were parts of it that were ready to be redone that she wouldn’t have redone. At the center of the apartment was the kitchen—we completely reconfigured and reimagined it.”
The new dual-zone heart of the home, with its glamorous lipstick-red custom range hood in the elegant open kitchen and hidden messy workspace behind, is just one of many places that reveals the frequent hostess’ newly discovered interior aesthetic: color! While she’s never shied from saturation in her collections, the Parsons chair emerita’s living spaces had always been neutral. Drake’s work, meanwhile, is all about color. “I said, ‘We come at it from different sides, but I’d love to work together, show people that we, who have different tastes, can come up with something fabulous,’” Unger says. She trusted his design sensibility and intellect. “And Jamie really added color in a way I’d never experienced and would never live without again.”
In designing the hood, Drake played off her only existing splash of color, red leather–covered Corbusier chairs—and then kept going. From a family heirloom Persian rug that was spoiled but sentimental and worth saving and her large Robert Rauschenberg, Drake pulled the pale cameo pink palette he felt was intuitive for the primary bedroom walls. “It’s such a beautiful thing to sleep in,” he says. “It’s like an embrace, a gentle kiss.” At first hesitant, Unger fully embraced it and can’t count the people who’ve asked for the Benjamin Moore Pink Damask ecocolor.
For the champions of Parsons’ Healthy Materials Lab, sustainability was another guiding light in the reimagination. There’s formaldehyde-free PureBond plywood in the kitchen millwork, an Edward Fields rug made of leather scraps, rolled corrugated cardboard tables repurposed from the 10th anniversary Healthy Materials Lab gala in 2025 at which the duo were honored, and a “magical” light art installation made of thousands of recycled plastic bottles. Half the furniture was salvaged from the flood, in some cases lusciously reupholstered or stripped and restained.
“She has marvelous things to work with, which worked into our commitment to be green and sustainable,” says Drake, adding that Unger’s art collection—partially inherited from her mother, partially purchased for herself—has “some really important pieces.” Part of the fun of this years-long project for the creatives was re-envisioning their placement. “We moved things around,” he says—five Andy Warhol “asses” from the primary to the foyer hallway, Mary Corse ceramics from a square arrangement into a linear hanging. “I think it’s a wonderful thing to do with things you own and treasure,” Drake says. "It’s how to reinvigorate your own personal interaction with them, by putting them in new installations. It literally changes your perspective.”
His adept approach blew away the sentimental collector. “You don’t have to be locked into art, it can become part of you,” says Unger, who likewise loves seeing the way people style her clothing for themselves. “So many people feel like, ‘Oh, I have to do everything exactly the way the artist wants,’ but if you own it, making it yours is OK. And I’ve experienced that really beautifully with Jamie.”
Originally published in Architectural Digest
Text by Kathryn Romeyn
Photos by Joe Kramm
