At Home with: Jeff Hilliard

Talking art, interiors, and furniture.

This is the first of another new series. I always loved Coveteur and Apartamento. I wanted to tap friends with great apartments and feature those here. Cocooning oneself from the chaos of NYC has always intrigued me. How do tasteful people furnish their homes to separate their spaces from the bustle below?

“You grew up here, but I’ve lived here 14 years and this is my sixth or seventh apartment,” starts Jeff Hilliard, one of my oldest friends in the #menswear scene. We met on Tumblr many years ago and no doubt, many of the photos you’ve seen of him online have probably been by me. I love Jeff’s style. He also happens to be one of the kindest people I’ve ever met. Being that he is an extraordinary dude, he also has a beautifully furnished apartment. I attended a birthday party Jeff had at his place a couple of years ago and was so taken with his spot that I vowed to find a way to feature it. You’ll find we don’t talk much about clothing here, and we don’t talk about watches at all.

“When I moved in here, I was probably in my early-to-mid-thirties. I've been here for three and a half years and it's my first apartment in New York where I was like, ‘It's got to feel as close to a home [as possible].’” He tells me that most things in the apartment he either made or had installed. He put his Vitsoe shelving units up with friends. His uncle, Patrick Strzelec—who Hilliard credits as being “super influential”—is a storied artist with his own studio in Pennsylvania. When the mood strikes Jeff, he heads there to create some furniture, like the daybed in his kitchen. “I really approached it as if it was an apartment I owned, even though I do not own it. That has made life better, to be honest. I work here now,” he reflects.

Another custom piece built by Jeff, including those ornate handles.

The following is an interview I conducted with Jeff last month about his relationship to art, furniture and his apartment. We talked about budgeting, aging, traveling, style, and more, accompanied by photos of Jeff’s apartment and some of his art collection.

When you’re younger, you have less money. As you age and hopefully progress in your career, that makes things a little bit easier to have somewhat nicer stuff.

Definitely. And it's worthwhile for me to spend a little bit more on stuff that I live with. I've also been lucky. My uncle's a painter and a sculptor, so a lot of the artwork around here is his. The painting above my sofa has special significance. There's this artist I really like, Kristin Texeira, and she paints these things called a memory map, which basically evoke a feeling through color. I like art with color. Five or six years ago, I took a trip with my brothers. That was a really important ski trip. It was the 20-year-anniversary of a trip that my dad had taken where he died. It was obviously emotional. It's a heliskiing trip, so definitely there's some danger to it. I asked her if she would do a collage, which is not really her normal way of working, but she was super chill about it. I wrote her nine vignettes from my experience. She took each paragraph and made it into a painting. That one in the center of the sun is an indirect reference to the beam of light photo in my bedroom. I got to know Kristin. We're kind of friends now and she's super dope. I love her work. I try to have stuff in here that has some type of significance. Not everything does, but it's nice when it does.

The aforementioned commission by Texeira.

How did you get interested in art in the first place?

I don't know. I think if you're into anything that's visual, you're probably into everything. Maybe that's an oversimplification. I really always have loved clothes and then that kind of thing went into furniture and then that went into art. I've just always appreciated people that are creative in whatever way, whether that's photographers, artists, sculptors, designers, people that make clothes, all that stuff. So it's all one big thing to me.

I have a tough time articulating what I like in art, even though I've taken some classes in school and been to countless museums and galleries. It’s such a personal thing. Is there a through line for some of the art in your apartment?