![]() Hendifar charged Carroll, also a guest at the dinner, with keeping the conversational energy flowing topics ranged from gardening to “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” the director Laura Poitras’s recent documentary about the photographer Nan Goldin. But he admired Gerrie’s ability to tell stories with ingredients: “It’s such an incredible experience to just let her do her thing.” Other portions of the evening were orchestrated by similarly reliable sources of good taste. “There are very few people in my life that I trust enough to say, ‘Surprise me,’” Hendifar said. Hendifar’s approach to this collaboration was straightforward: He told Gerrie what mood he wanted to create, then stepped back and let her work her magic. The two had been friends for about a decade and had worked together before for a few Apparatus events. Hendifar says that the Eight at Eight dinners were built around the idea that Gerrie would be the chef. (The dinner’s parsley, chives, lemongrass and lemon verbena all came from Gerrie’s own rooftop garden in SoHo.) “I try to think about things that don’t intimidate people or overwhelm them,” Gerrie said, “like a slightly different version of something that they might have already had.” At dinner, she served a chimichurri over Long Island cod that was both familiar and unexpected, the sauce’s traditional shallot and onion both absent to let the fresh herbs shine. Gerrie and Hendifar favor informal finger foods for appetizers to put guests at ease and avoid fussiness. Guests snacked on Concord grapes and aged Gouda, with different varieties of each on separate tables to encourage mingling. Hendifar, wearing a bright red Yves Saint Laurent top and a pair of black Khaite trousers, sprawled on the room’s leopard-print carpet by a stack of floor pillows. The gathering kicked off with Perseval-Farge champagne and cocktails in a lounge area that serves as the antechamber to Hendifar’s office. As the showroom’s three galleries shifted configurations each season to display the brand’s latest work, business operations hummed along in the back - half the floor was given over to offices, packaging and shipping and the artisans producing the pieces themselves. Hendifar, who grew up in Los Angeles, has sometimes incorporated references to his Iranian heritage into the studio’s output, like a dining table whose shape resembles that of a Persian tombak drum. One collection was inspired by 1970s decadence, another by the visual language of the early 20th-century Austrian decorative arts collective the Wiener Werkstätte. The mood they conjured was dramatic and seductive: tassel-shaped lamps dangling above plush carpets, marble tables alongside low velvet sofas. Hendifar, 41, and his team transformed the space into a lush showroom for Apparatus’s Modernist furniture and brass light fixtures, which the brand has produced since 2012, when Hendifar founded the company with his then partner in business and life, Jeremy Anderson. My own work is about creating universes that people can step into, so there was an immediate feeling of: We have to figure out how to make this happen.” “It was one of those stepping-through-a-portal experiences in Manhattan,” Hendifar said, “where you open a door, and this whole universe unfolds. Behind a vaultlike copper door lay the high-ceilinged former studio of the painter Philip Taaffe the space had previously been the gym of a boys’ high school. When Gabriel Hendifar, the artistic director of the New York-based design studio Apparatus, first set foot on the fourth floor of an unassuming Chelsea building in 2015, he knew he’d found his next headquarters.
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