Name: Elsa Mehary
Occupation: Designer behind the jewelry line, Mehary, and art director
The space: A large two-bedroom brownstone storefront in Brooklyn, New York City
Elsa Mehary is the kind of girl who doesn’t let overweight luggage or small air cabins stand in her way when it comes to scoring a good apartment find. “I can remember being 19-years-old and hand carrying a large glass lantern from Cairo back on the plane because it was too fragile to pack in my luggage,” she says of one of the many conversation-starting details in her impressively curated pad. “But now, the same lamp can be found in SoHo or a store like West Elm, imported for half the price and minus the story of adventure in an intricate maze of bazaars,” she adds.
Elsa has lived in her unusually large apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn for 15 years and she’s spent that time filling the place with carefully chosen figures and textiles she’s picked up traveling to places such as Bali, India and Tulum. Many people talk about wanting to create a home that transports a person somewhere else. But Elsa has actually pulled it off. “I think of my apartment as a serene oasis in the center of chaos,” she says.
She’s achieved an overall look and feeling of zen through a mix of spiritual figures and colors that she found in near and far-flung places. There’s the gold head of Buddha she found in Chinatown: “It’s really heavy but I love the serenity it brings to the space.” And an ornate cross that lies next to a box of Bach flower remedies imported from Israel. “I was born in Ethiopia and plan on returning there this year to visit all the amazing churches built into the ground in Lalibela. The cross is a traditional Orthodox relic from Addis Adabaa originally owned by my mom,” she explains.
“The look of my apartment is constantly changing,” Elsa admits. But the sense of calm never changes. “I incorporate the feng shi principles in determining location of color throughout the house.”
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