Design Hunting
When the onetime East Village antiques dealer John Eaton returned after a year in Paris, he decided to settle in an industrial space upstate.
A former East Village antiques dealer’s upstate loft
If john eaton’s 1,000-square-foot loft apartment in a former truck-tire-maintenance garage in Hudson, New York, looks like a design gallery, well, that’s because it sort of is. I first met Eaton in 1998, when he lived in the East Village on Tompkins Square Park and owned a tiny antiques shop, Geomancy, on East 9th Street, that was frequented by the likes of Helen and Brice Marden and Iman. His walk-up railroad apartment was populated with a fascinating and always changing mix of found art and vintage furniture. After he closed his shop, he worked with Bobbi Brown as
her creative-design director for 13 years. Then he took a year off to live in Paris. On his return in May 2019, he decided that after 38 years in New York City, he’d rather live upstate, in Hudson, a town known for its antiques and creative community.
There, instead of settling in an old house, he wanted “a big empty space with no details, and that was kind of my dream.” The onebedroom Eaton moved to serves as the perfect blank page for his storytelling through the objects and art he falls in love with and lives with—at least for a while. He also has a gallery space in the Warehouse in Hudson, where interior designers such as James Huniford, Stephen Henderson, and Calvin Tsao sleuth out his finds.
The treasures he’s living with include a self-portrait by the local artist Earl Swanigan (1964–2019), who painted many murals around Hudson. He has a handmade Welsh stick chair by local artisan John Porritt (if you are looking to buy one for yourself, be warned: He will not be rushed). There are also pieces he shipped back from France—Eaton recalls lugging the pair of mid-centurymodern armchairs, now in his living room, back to his Paris apartment balanced on his head, as the taxi couldn’t make it from the flea market owing to last year’s yellow-vest protests.
The Jean Michel Frank–style nesting tables—Eaton knew they weren’t the real thing since Frank’s tables don’t have a support bar and these do—date from a spell when he lived in Amsterdam. His mid-century-modern Brazilian rosewood table, from a company called Walter Wabash, used to be in his East Village apartment: Now it can stretch out in all its glory (there was never enough room in his old place to add the leaves), and a mix of French 1940s bridge chairs and English oak chairs make the table fit for a dinner party.
If there is one piece that speaks to the poetic sensibility of Eaton’s eye, it would be the wood frame of a 19th-century side chair accessorized by what looks like a piece of stone positioned on the back. “It’s just a frame,” Eaton muses. “But there is something about the frame that just spoke to me, and the ‘shard’ that is on there—that is some Styrofoam thing that I found in New York, and it was white and I painted it black, and one day it just landed on this chair, and I thought, This is kind of perfect: It was like two things that randomly found each other.” ■