Design Hunting
Paper co-founder Kim Hastreiter’s candy-colored office
Kim hastreiter has lived in a “kind of vanilla” postwar building overlooking Washington Square Park since 1993. She didn’t love it when she first saw it, but it was highly civilized and, having lived in Soho since 1980—back when it was dangerous—she says, “I wanted to live somewhere where I didn’t have to run for my life when I went out for a newspaper.”
At the same time, the New York she moved to was a place of opportunity, a place where people built their dreams out of will and ingenuity. Hastreiter came to the city (driving from California with the performance artist Joey Arias) after art school. She befriended the photographer Bill Cunningham, who urged her to become the style editor at the SoHo Weekly News. In 1984, she co-founded Paper magazine in her loft on Lispenard Street with David Hershkovits. For decades, Paper shone a light on new talent, new scenes, and new movements downtown. You almost always heard it there first.
“My mother died the same week I sold Paper,” in 2017, says Hastreiter. Hastreiter’s Village apartment became a catchall for the contents of her former office as well as the myriad of boxes of her mother’s possessions. She needed more space, not only to create a proper archive of work but also for new projects, so she purchased a studio
downstairs to use as an office. (Her mother’s architect, Milton Klein, renovated her apartment, and architect Solveig Fernlund renovated this office space.) Hastreiter’s ongoing projects include writing a four-part memoir, curating a public-art initiative for PBS with Radical Media, and putting together a popup “public service” newspaper called The New Now. (It will be an analog endeavor, free of ads and free of charge, “delivered heroically by USPS,” she says.) The office looks like a grown-up playroom with its lollipop palette of bright colors and crisp built-ins that include a giant sofa. The décor echoes that of her apartment upstairs, which has its own built-in couch, eye-popping color palette, and the bulk of an art collection that any design museum would love to have. “Everything was built-in in my home growing up,” Hastreiter says. “On the very large built-in couch, my father would be napping, my mother would be knitting, I would be doing the crossword puzzle, my sister reading.”
One thing her office hasn’t been, since March, is social. And so ever since her building went into lockdown, she has been holding her meetings with artists, performers, writers, and friends on a shady bench in Washington Square Park, where the grass is the same color as her indoor carpet.