Curating art into everyday life, residential interior designer Cheryl McGinnis creates spaces that reflect each dweller’s personal story. By Tina Seligman
Residential interior designer Cheryl McGinnis ardently believes that with life’s everyday stress, we often forget who we are until we re-enter our home… and then we remember. Home is a place of memories, and light, even during our darkest days. Home is a place to fly. And, like an art collection, a home is a diary of our lives. This is why “Home Matters.” Unlike designers and decorators who project their distinctive style and personality on the client’s house or apartment, McGinnis finds that furniture, objects, and art with no personal relationship to the client leads to disconnection. However beautiful, it’s as if living in someone else’s space. She feels honored to spend time with each client to discover who they are, and measures her success by how the environment she creates reflects the dweller’s passions and needs.
Throughout her career as an interior designer, curator, and gallery owner, McGinnis has been consistently process-oriented and non-traditional. One of the first art dealers in Manhattan to create a contemporary salon with artist talks and educational outreach for critical thinking, her mission is to create conversation between viewer and artist, and an exhibition atmosphere that echoes the spirit of a home. Replacing the traditional white-box gallery with the warmth of historic architecture complete with window seats for tea and conversation, she offers the opportunity to imagine the artwork as a natural part of the viewer’s own life and home. Although McGinnis occasionally brings art to show an interior design client, she has great respect for their collections regardless of where they purchase the work. She is there to serve the client and what is meaningful for them. With a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Fordham University and the University of Rome, she is acutely aware of the context of art. When curating for a client’s home, her choice is not only a visual statement, but a way of connecting the art to a client’s life story. For one woman whose house is situated along the bay in New Jersey, McGinnis commissioned George Zhaozhi Xiong to create a painting of her beloved dogs running along the beach. This painting was one of the few items of the house that survived Hurricane Sandy’s devastation. McGinnis is currently rebuilding the house and plans to place the same artist’s Lotus Screen when the structural work is completed. This functional Postmodernist painting of resilience is by an artist who had lived through the traumas of the Cultural Revolution and ate lotus seeds to survive the famine during Mao’s Great Leap. Although heartbroken by the destruction, McGinnis finds the rebuilding process extremely healing. The advantage of coming from a non-contracting discipline is that anything seems possible. Working intuitively without pre-set drawings to be completed, she builds the design in the same fluid, process-oriented way that visual artists work. McGinnis is raising this hurricane-torn house ten feet to prevent future flooding. The house, built on a concrete slab, offered a technical challenge and McGinnis was advised by engineers that it couldn’t be done. Working collaboratively with her fully-licensed master contractor, Nick Djelevic, who, with his expert team, shares her open, imaginative approach she found a solution that works both structurally and aesthetically.
As a company, Home Matters Design started as organically as her salon and gallery. While installing artwork in her gallery clients’ apartments and houses, she began to move furniture around to best highlight the artwork. Suggesting changes of wall color, upholstery and occasionally furniture led to word of mouth and suddenly, McGinnis had a second business. Many requests for Home Matters now come from people who aren’t aware of the gallery. In recent years, she has shifted from being a decorator with a house painter, to designing structural renovation with Djelevic and his crew. Creating a new business model with a hybrid based on a wide range of experiences from different disciplines, McGinnis continues to study the technical limitations and possibilities of the structural elements, while Djelevic reciprocally learns about art installation. In February 2013, they worked together with artist Lin Yan to inventively install “Embracing Stillness” in the glass enclosed Prow Art Space of Manhattan’s iconic Flatiron building.
The ultimate mission is to transform the inhabitant’s life. McGinnis often celebrates this momentous change by unveiling the design with a brunch or reception reminiscent of an art opening. Devoted to community outreach, McGinnis is also a mentor to teenage girls in under-served neighborhoods, most notably at the Children’s Storefront School of Harlem. She often visits and rearranges their apartments pro bono because she feels that everyone deserves a comfortable, special living space, not just those who can afford it. Since its inception in 2005, Home Matters Design has worked on hundreds of apartments, houses, and beach houses in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Michigan, and California. Visit www.homematters-design.com for more information.