Karen Robinovitz has a spidey sense for what’s about to be cool. For decades she’s collected contemporary art, snagging works by stars like Emily Mae Smith, Julie Curtiss, and Genesis Belanger just before they hit the big time. In 2010 she cofounded Digital Brand Architects, a talent management agency for influencers that cemented their role in the media landscape. By 2018, she was lurking on Etsy, buying, of all things, bespoke slime from savvy young makers who were not yet old enough to drink.
“The word spread that there was this adult buying everyone’s slime,” Karen recalls from her dining table, a resin confection by Francesco Balzano the color of milky tea. “I started to go to the slime conventions. I started buying it for myself and friends.”
Slime—that ooey gooey, fun-to-squish-between-your-fingers stuff, newly embraced by Gen Z and ASMR addicts on TikTok and YouTube—had proven a surprising source of stress relief and human connection for Karen when she suffered the tragic loss of a loved one. In 2019 she launched the Sloomoo Institute, a sensory slime experience and retailer in SoHo. New locations are opening this fall in Atlanta and Chicago. With Sloomoo, she somehow managed to merge her new material obsession with her old one—on my first visit to her apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Karen sent me home with watermelon slime created by the buzzy Brooklyn-based painter Katherine Bernhardt (one of her brightly hued paintings greets visitors at the front door).
All of this is to say: Karen Robinovitz has vision. She sees something, she feels something, she must have it. But when she and her husband, Darren Fields, an investor, moved into their new apartment in 2020—an essential step to her slime-aided healing process—she had to call in backups. “I needed someone to save me from myself,” the chronic collector says. “Otherwise I would make every single item in the apartment a moment and nothing will be able to breathe.”
Enter: GOD. No, not that God. The New York City–based design firm cofounded by Olivia Song and Gillian Dubin (GOD is an acronym for Gillian Olivia Design), who Karen called on to help her find that breathing room. “What would God say?” or “Do we have God’s blessing?” became common refrains during their design process.
Here, everything started with the art—in fact, the home’s crisp white walls were part of what sealed the deal for Karen (moldings and other architectural details are great but can make such a major art installation much more complicated). The collection—of nearly all women artists—packs serious punch, as did Karen’s growing cache of collectable design—she’d locked down pieces by Katie Stout, Misha Kahn, and Thomas Barger early in their careers.
But she needed Gillian and Olivia to keep her from going too hard. As promised, they introduced neutral pieces like a charcoal gray sofa from Property Furniture and a cookies-n-cream marble cocktail table from Holly Hunt to operate as palette cleansers between the eye-popping paintings by Kylie Manning, Ginny Casey, and Jess Valice. Much of it simply came down to color—major pieces like the sculptural sofa by Raphael Navot from Atelier Courbet, the Etcetera chair, and side tables by Karen Swami and BDDW were ordered in shades of cream or sand. And even though Karen first fell for that resin dining table in pink, after talking it over with GOD, she went with the more muted shade.
Though Olivia and Gillian are self-proclaimed minimalists, not all of their prescriptions were beige. In the living room, they argued, the magenta upholstery for a pair of Pierre Paulin lounge chairs could actually operate as a neutral.
GOD wasn’t just there to weigh in on colors. The homeowners and designers worked together on a range of design commissions—like a super precise whisky cabinet by Jonathan Nesci that holds Darren’s extensive collection (overflow goes to a closet nearby), or Karen’s vanity, made by French design duo Superpoly. “I wanted something really fun and playful and almost like what my 10-year-old self would’ve wanted to put her makeup on,” explains Karen. She paired it with a Misha Kahn chair that looks like it might belong to the Little Mermaid. From time to time, Olivia and Gillian intervened when Karen fell head over heels for something just a little too cuckoo. “Sometimes we’d just reply to her text with a barf emoji,” Olivia says with a laugh.
The art, though? That was Karen’s department. And her collection tells the story of the last few decades of her life. The first piece she ever bought—a delicate sculpture of a gun made of porcelain and sugar by Susan Graham from her tongue-in-cheek series called My Dad's Gun Collection—remains in the mix on a shelf upstairs. As do other firsts, like the tooth bowl by Genesis Belanger that she fell in love with at first sight at NADA in 2018, or an early painting by Danielle Mckinney. Major paintings, which she regularly loans out to museums and institutions, hang alongside a stuffed sloth—a gift from Darren—and a baby Yoda doll. Nothing in this house takes itself too seriously.
For young collectors just starting out, Karen has advice: “Look for what you love,” she says. “What moves you emotionally? Ignore what may or may not increase in value. I have always purchased from passion versus how the art world defines things.” But also, she says, do your homework: Go to museums and galleries, refine your eye, read the press releases. “The story of a piece and the process of how it’s created are big parts of it for me.”
Karen admits she’s been lucky: “A lot of things I’ve bought have turned into great investments, but for me it’s literally about what do I want to see when I walk in? What do I want to get inspired by every day?”
Sometimes when Darren is watching TV with her, he’ll notice that she’s not paying attention. Her eyes are darting around. For Karen, it’s simple: “I'm looking at the art. Everything that I do comes from looking at art, seeing it, feeling, learning from it.”
Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest
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