100
THE EXCHANGE
I
N LATE MARCH of 2020, Lee Broom stood on a
New York City sidewalk and watched as a crate
holding an ’80s cocktail bar he’d recently bought
swayed six stories high in the breeze, steadying
itself before being craned onto the terrace of his new
Tribeca penthouse. He pulled out his phone and took
a video. “It was frightening, but I was kind of like,
these are the lengths you go to to get exactly what
you want,” he says.
A British designer of lighting, furniture and
objects, Broom has pulled off a few nail-biters him-
self—suspending a crystal tree inside the 31st floor
of London’s Shard tower, staging a light show inside a
delivery van en route from England to Italy. For brands
such as Fendi, Christian Louboutin and Bergdorf
Goodman, the 45-year-old designer has come up with
more sedate but no less powerful effects in boutiques
and window displays, drawing on the deco-inspired
modernism that’s become his signature.
The New York move, though, has tested him. A day
after the bar touched down, but with weeks still to go
on his renovation, Broom was forced to take one of theBY SARAH MEDFORD
PHOTOGRAPHY BY
STEPHEN KENT JOHNSON
Lured by a booming
market—and clients including
Beyoncé and Jay-Z—British
designer Lee Broom sets
up house in New York City.
COMING TO
AMERICA
DESIGNER DIGS few remaining pre-lockdown flights back to his full-
time home in London, where he’s spent the past year
thinking about how much fun living in Tribeca will
eventually be. (He hopes to move in later this year.)
His apartment, occupying part of a converted
cast-iron office building on one of the neighborhood’s
quieter side streets, has the sort of au courant knotty
wood, travertine marble finishes and traditional floor
plan meant to woo young families out of their noisy
lofts or down from the Upper East Side. Broom’s idea
had been to make it a showroom, a replacement for
the SoHo storefront his company had outgrown, that
would be loosely modeled on a residential space and
double as a place for him to stay now and then. (The
U.S. is the biggest of his 67 global markets, accounting
for 35 percent of sales.) But as the pandemic wore on,
his public/private concept wilted. Sharing the three-
bedroom duplex with anyone other than his partner,
Charles Rudgard, who is also CEO of the Lee Broom
company, seemed like a bad idea, and he started think-
ing about a sanctuary instead. He got on the phone to
his small team in New York and asked them to make
CLEAN SWEEP
Lee Broom lighting
and furniture—
including his Hanging
Hoop Chair—in the
living room of his new
Tribeca penthouse.WSJ. MAGAZINEPORTRAIT: LUKE HAYESminor modifications, which wrapped up last summer.
In London, Broom lives with Rudgard in an open-
plan loft they bought 15 years ago as “a party flat,”
he says, in a former firehouse not far from Waterloo
Station. The relatively intimate scale of the Tribeca
rooms resonated with them; they seemed perfect for
vignettes when a showroom was still in the picture.
Though the apartment’s function is now domestic,
it still comes across as polished, theatrical, heav-
ily produced—the decorating equivalent of K-pop,
with hooplike chandeliers, a chrome dining set and
tone-on-tone paintings in makeup colors. Wherever a
piece of abstract sculpture or a spherical lamp might
look right, plinths are strategically placed to display
it. And apart from a few vintage pieces, Broom has
designed almost everything himself.
“Every time I had an Amazon delivery person
come, they’d say, ‘Ooh, I love that chair!’” he says,
remembering the reaction he got last spring to a
swing chair hanging from a metal chain in the liv-
ing room. Beyoncé and Jay-Z found a place for one at
home after she borrowed it for the filming of her 2020
visual album, Black Is King. The downy, pill-shaped
sofas nearby, hovering over a beige carpet, are new
and named White Street after Broom’s local address.
He found inspiration for a pair of blocky marble cof-
fee tables in the windowless AT&T tower just outside
the window; the brutalist building, designed by John
Carl Warnecke in 1969 (and worshiped—or reviled—
by generations of New Yorkers) is a favorite of his.
“If I am really honest with myself, when I think
about a place that I’d like to be living in the next 10,
maybe 15 years, a concrete brutalist structure with
huge windows and a sofa would be perfect,” he says.
But it’s hard to imagine Broom giving up the
illusionistic effects he’s used so successfully here.
Mirrors, like the ones conjuring halls-to-nowhere on
either side of the fireplace, are constants. So are what
he calls “perfect-wave drapes”—a running fence of
fluted fabric that lends the place an onstage air as it
hides closets, bathrooms and awkward hallways and
cloaks a view of the kitchen from the living room.
“I have an aversion toward doors, and there are
a lot of doors in the apartment,” Broom explains.
“There is definitely a showroom quality for sure, but
this is how I live. I have so much mess around my life
with my work, the factory, the workshop, everything
else. And it drives me insane.”
Broom comes by his gift for heightened reality
honestly. As a child in Birmingham, in the English
Midlands, he attended theater school and joined the
Royal Shakespeare Company at age 9, performing
with Ralph Fiennes and others and earning his Equity
card at 16. After entering and winning a national fash-
ion design contest on a lark, the 17-year-old Broom
found his way to the atelier of Vivienne Westwood,
who’d been one of the judges. Within a year (which
he spent with Westwood’s pattern-cutting team
and as a dresser for her Paris ready-to-wear shows),
he’d ditched acting to study fashion at Central Saint
Martins in London. He shifted to product design after
graduating and opened his business in 2007.
“Vivienne was a big mentor for me,” Broom says.“Looking to techniques or traditions or materials
from the past and creating contemporary products
around them—that definitely stems from my period
with Vivienne.” And from his time with Shakespeare?
“Well, you’re just thrown into the past in your pair of
tights and your codpiece, do you know what I mean?”
Broom’s personal history is on view in his study,
where paintings by friends crowd the walls oppo-
site a record console he bought for 50 pounds on a
vacation to Brighton one summer. A leather jacket
that once belonged to Keith Haring hangs on a coat
hook. Before the artist died, he painted a silver cru-
cifixion scene on its back and gave the jacket to his
boyfriend at the time; Broom bought it 15 years ago
at a Philadelphia art gallery, an irresistible piece of
downtown memorabilia repatriated.
What’s not on display is Broom’s own artwork. In
his acting days he sketched constantly—architecture
and fashion, he recalls, but also fantasy interiors. “I
used to draw the house that I imagined I would live in
when I was older,” he says. “It was always a modern-
ist structure with, I guess, a hint of Dynasty.”•PAUSE , PL AY
Clockwise from top left:
The wood-paneled master
bathroom; an Italian
travertine desk in the study;
Broom in the living room;
a room divider–turned–
cocktail bar by Los Angeles
designer Steve Chase.
Styling, Michael Reynolds.