“It’s really important to let yourself go and try to find the unexpected. It’s an innate quality in everything we do. There’s this level of discovery, surprise, and intrigue that has to be there,” says architect and designer Giancarlo Valle of his design process. It’s evident in the tactile, graphic, and layered home he and wife Jane Keltner de Valle, style director of Architectural Digest, conjured up out of a former concrete block in Dumbo’s iconic clock-tower building. I felt a sense of nostalgia as soon as I walked into the building to visit them; I bought my first apartment at that same address nineteen years ago, and, in a sense, my love of design began there. It made Jane and Giancarlo’s brilliant transformation of the space that much more appreciated.

The doors open up to a large, bright room filled with striking jewel tones, eye-catching sculptural furniture, and playful patterns. Nothing inside is accidental, yet nothing is contrived. As an architect and furniture designer, Giancarlo knows that for design to be successful, it has to be a conversation among styles, objects, and architecture. Antique tapestries cover the walls and iconic vintage furniture is interwoven throughout: a low Milo Baughman burlwood coffee table anchors the living room, and a Pierre Jeanneret Chandigarh desk cements the library. “We would stumble onto these pieces as they came into our lives and discovered them,” Giancarlo told me. “We used them to anchor and build whole rooms around them.” The couple’s den, for instance, lacked direction until they stumbled upon a Gae Aulenti salmon-hued marble table in an antique store.

“It’s essential to not design everything all at once; remove yourself. Let something guide you to a place—it leads to solutions that you just couldn’t have found otherwise.”

Naturally, Giancarlo used his new home as an opportunity to mine his own design curiosities, including a wave motif that is recurrent in their apartment. “The motif is in some ways universal,” explains Giancarlo. “You would find it in ancient Rome and again in the Inca empire, and in the fifties and sixties in Royère’s designs. I was obsessed with trying to develop it further.” In their home, it takes on a playful and novel quality, surfacing in the living room’s built-in window seat, on the plywood stools tucked under the kitchen counter, and even in their children’s bedroom on the shelving millwork.

Most striking of all, however, is the sense of intimacy the erstwhile industrial space now communicates. “We kind of embraced the weirdness,” says Giancarlo. “The starting point was to balance this raw and refined aesthetic in a way that felt balanced and had a level of authenticity—and to treat the concrete in an honest way.” While they accomplished this by filling the space with collected furniture, the materials and finishes used perhaps had an even more potent effect in softening the industrial.

In the bedroom, Giancarlo covered the walls in a velvety oyster-hued plaster, which is complemented by a panel of billowy white linen that hangs over the bed by two humble wood poles. This simultaneously softens the room and conceals the harshness of the ceiling beams. The beams were, in fact, a point of contention; a feng shui expert had advised the couple that they inhibit energy. This cautionary missive sowed a kernel of doubt that the couple felt they had to resolve. They replicated the solution in the children’s room, with a canopy of soft coral-hued fabric draping from the ceiling over the daybed. These two elements, intended as a compromise, became one of the best decorative devices in the home—proof that problem-solving can yield rich results.

The once-bare concrete apartment has evolved into a layered, rich home filled with art, objects, and history that belies Giancarlo’s crafty resourcefulness. His addition of panel moldings on the living room walls creates an elegant, sophisticated effect, while inexpensive plywood was deployed throughout, at times left raw, whitewashed, or with a luxe parchment finish. In lieu of traditional pulls or knobs, he carved triangular cutouts to act as hardware—a nod to functionalist Shaker-style furniture.

A harmonious tension between the raw and the soft, the industrial and cultivated, makes Giancarlo and Jane’s home surprising and uniquely compelling. The couple strived to create a soulful and romantic home out of space that was decidedly not. Slowly, each beloved piece informed where the next one should go, while a practical ingenuity guided and supported their process—one that continues to evolve. Their most valuable lesson? “Rome wasn’t built in a day. Don’t rush it.”

“I think design is really successful when it’s a conversation between styles and objects.”