In his nine years of living in New York City, the product and graphic designer Ben Ganz has moved between some half-dozen apartments. Many were shared with roommates, and most were never fully furnished or equipped with solid appliances, let alone an HVAC system.
With his new SoHo loft, you could say that Ganz, 34, has reached a state of New York nirvana: owning a home that has been renovated to his taste as a live-work space, complete with furniture of his own design and ventilated with central air-conditioning.
"My vision of a home," he says, "but also what I imagine is the perfect work environment."
The loft, on the sixth floor of a 126-year-old building, can be reached via several flights of stairs-or by cranking a hand-operated elevator. What the place lacks in modern amenities, it makes up for in natural light. It is flanked by windows along three sides, a feature that Ganz has played up with high-gloss ice-blue floors and matching ceilings, which together give the space a bowling alley-like sheen that reflects light to a diffused, ethereal effect.
Ganz moved late last year, just as his personal life and career began to percolate at a rapid simmer. In June, he married India Ennenga, 31, a writer-editor-actress. Soon he will be widely releasing products that could make him more of a household name. They include a wood-and-aluminum bed, dresser and nightstand that will be introduced next year at Design Within Reach.
Ganz and Ennenga's new home has been a half-decade in the making. He bought the 2,000-square-foot loft in 2020, before they started dating, for about $2.65 million-a pandemic discount, he says. Ganz was blissfully naive about the effort it would take to rehabilitate it, which cost about $500,000.
Working with the young architectural designers Nile Greenberg and Michael Abel Deng, Ganz set out to design a multidimensional floor-through space. He first worked with Greenberg, 38, and Abel Deng, 36, when the three collaborated on a project for Homer, the jewelry line founded by the recording artist Frank Ocean.
Raised in Bern, Switzerland, Ganz says that his rigid Swiss education informed his and his architects' choice to build with materials that are plentiful and functional, including aluminum beams and frosted-glass walls that divide spaces while allowing light to seep through. The allover glacier-tone floors are complemented by flashes of pea-soup green and cornflower blue on walls and cabinetry, which have their own lacquerlike sheens.
The effect makes the home glow in cool tones like the set of an early 2000s pop-music video, the kind that was paired with frosted lip gloss and cyber-age clothing. Ganz has a different take on the look. "It's like a dentist clinic from the future," he says, noting that he was drawn to the aesthetic's sense of order. "It's very cold."
"We joke that it's the blue spaceship," Ennenga adds.
Ganz moved to New York three years before he bought the loft, after earning a master's degree in graphic design at Yale. Soon after moving, he was named artistic director of Pin-Up magazine, the biannual architecture and furniture-design publication. From there, independent design commissions accelerated. He started his own firm in 2021. It now employs three designers in addition to Ganz, who has also worked on projects for Nike and Prada.
Having dabbled in furniture, bedding and storage, Ganz now aspires to apply his sensibility across a full spectrum of everyday products. He'd be following in the footsteps of design greats like Michael Graves and Marc Newson-whose slime-green dish rack design sits on the brushed-aluminum countertop in Ganz and Ennenga's kitchen.
Throughout the day, their apartment is separated from Ganz's studio space by two massive aluminum swivel doors that remain closed to create a mental and physical divide between the two spaces.
"I don't like to think about it like I work from home," Ganz says. "I like to think about it like my office is one door away from my apartment."
In the evenings, the couple convenes in the back part of the apartment to cook meals and read. While Ganz had planned their home's design before the two got together, Ennenga has since introduced eclectic elements to warm up her husband's taste for stark minimalism. She encouraged Ganz to move Alpine furniture from his grandmother's Swiss chalet to New York City in their suitcases. Even Ennenga was "a little unsure of how it would work" in such a bare home, she says.
It turned out that the full set of classic whittled dining chairs and a milking stool were an ideal foil to Ganz's design, highlighting the handmade pieces' organic silhouettes. The couple sees them as their apartment's finishing touch.
"That's what I love about this space-it's a growing system," Ganz says. "My life has changed and developed and so has my practice. I love that here they can run alongside each other in harmony."