Where the Wild Chairs Are
A designer’s unconventional furniture upends his traditional prewar apartment.
By Wendy Goodman, Curbed and New York Magazine’s design editor
Minjae Kim designs furniture with eccentric details. A chair might be topped with rabbit ears or carved fish. He calls one of his playful works of light the Hat lamp. When he set out to find a place of his own a few years ago, he went in a more conventional direction.
“I was looking for old architecture,” Kim says. He found it in a prewar building in Bedford-Stuyvesant with coffered ceilings and original moldings and shutters. The parlor-floor unit, which features an original, elaborately carved wooden mantelpiece, became a period backdrop for his hypermodern aesthetic. He painted the walls green, which can read yellow depending on the light.
“I needed a defined living room and dining space because I wanted to build a table and all the chairs around it,” he says. “I wanted to fill the apartment with 90 percent furniture that I make.”
Kim was born in Seoul and grew up traveling with his parents. His father is a Won Buddhist minister who moved the family to England for a year; his mother is the painter Myoung Ae Lee, who encouraged her son to sketch the buildings he saw during boyhood trips (he still has his notebook from a tour of Paris museums).
As an undergraduate, Kim took classes in furniture design—“It kind of got me hooked,” he says—and later, after getting a master’s in architecture at Columbia University and working for the interior designer Giancarlo Valle, he set up his own woodshop.
During the pandemic, Kim found more time to dedicate to his furniture practice, and in 2021, he had his first solo show at Marta Los Angeles. Now he builds and carves his pieces full time in a basement studio in Bushwick that, like home, is packed with his surreal furnishings. “I want it to be super-open-ended,” Kim says of his work. “I am still very confused: Is it design, or is it sculpture?”
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