TODD SELBY, a photographer based in New York, is becoming a kind of Horst of the hip set: an environmental portraitist of Williamsburg and Silver Lake society. Since the summer, Mr. Selby, 31, has been shooting his mostly young, mostly good-looking subjects — movie directors, fashion models and designers, painters, writers, indie magazine editors — in their homes in New York and Los Angeles (and, more recently, London and Mexico). The results are posted on a Web site, theselby.com, and will be exhibited next spring at Colette, the Paris boutique.

Mr. Selby started the project, he said, because of his curiosity about the ways personal space reflects personality. “I’ll see an interesting character and think, what does their apartment look like?” he said. The answers vary, of course, but most of the places in these pictures, like their inhabitants, are attractive in a seemingly offhand way (even when, like their inhabitants, they have been carefully put together).

Often, Mr. Selby hears about a compelling home through friends, and after a cursory visit he sets up a shoot — a process, he says, that is loose and collaborative. “It’s their opportunity to tell the world what they’re all about,” Mr. Selby said. “ ‘This is my favorite book’; ‘this is a picture of me and my mom.’ I think it’s really exciting to them.”

Several people photographed for the project know one another, and most confess they check the site regularly to see whose interiors have been added (there are now around 60 on the site, which has been growing by about three a week).

Mr. Selby’s own apartment, in Manhattan, has not made an appearance. A self-described maximalist, he said he has scaled back on flea market visits since beginning the project and being exposed to so much stuff. “I see people who have these amazing collections and I love it,” he said, “but I love coming home to a blank slate.”

He is content to live vicariously through the homes of his subjects, he said. Here, a few offer their own takes on their personal spaces and the things that fill them.

Ceramic Ponies and Blown Glass in the Kitchen: When Collections Overflow

As an interior designer who works primarily with young, affluent bohemian clients, Ryan Korban says he has developed his own “downtown” decorating style. “It’s a mixture of 1970s Italian, which is similar to midcentury but sexier and more polished,” he said, “and traditional 18th century.” He is big on brass lamps, full-length mirrors, chunky antique furniture and eccentric curios, as evidenced by his own 550-square-foot studio apartment in SoHo.

Mr. Korban, 24, created a small, set-off living area with a pair of Federal-style chairs — for which he had powder blue tufted cushions made — and a sleek update of a Porter floor lamp. Elsewhere, he spruced up “a horrible rental kitchen” by replacing the plastic cabinet hardware with brushed nickel handles, painting the walls chalkboard gray, and adding unlikely decorative items, like a ceramic pony on a wooden lacquer pedestal, a porcelain blue-and-white Chinese urn atop the fridge, and blown-glass pastry stands from Sur la Table. “I collect these things and I run out of space to put them,” Mr. Korban said. “So I decided to put things in spaces where you wouldn’t expect. I left them there for a few days and it worked.”

Bringing Fashion to the Bathroom Walls

Last spring, when the bathroom of his apartment was being redone, Brian Lichtenberg suggested a design to his landlord. “I thought it would be cool to do it like Givenchy,” he said, referring to the fashion label’s blocky geometric logo, which is now rendered in black tile in his shower. Mr. Lichtenberg, 29, is a self-taught fashion designer with an eponymous label of his own, and he has also incorporated elements of his design work throughout the three-bedroom apartment he rents on the top floor of a 1920s house in the Silver Lake area of Los Angeles. The walls of a second bathroom, for example, are painted in a red, yellow and blue drip style, a design he developed for a hooded sweatshirt (the colors drip from the hood). He describes his aesthetic, in both fashion and décor, as “stark and minimal, but graphic and colorful,” though his at-home showroom is plain white: “White clears your head,” he said. He liked being part of Mr. Selby’s project, he added, mainly because “it was a good excuse to make the apartment tidy and nice.”

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By STEVEN KURUTZ

Source: New York Times – U.S.A.