A stunning Manhattan loft space doubles up as a home and an exhibition space
Photography by Jeremy Liebman
When I take the elevator up to gallerist Alex Tieghi-Walker’s fifth-floor loft, in a turn of the century factory building in Tribeca, the doors open on to a gallery space with stark-white floors and his rescue dog, Ivo, bounds up to me. The loft is where Welsh-born, Italian-bred, New-York-dwelling Tieghi-Walker lives and works. “When I found this place, it was kind of like a golden unicorn,” he says. “I needed somewhere to live and I needed somewhere for my gallery. To find somewhere that could do both was great.”
When he moved in, in 2023, the apartment had bright blue laminate flooring, exposed brick walls and faux industrial lighting. He spent the next three months remodelling it. There was no kitchen, no proper bathroom, no air conditioning. He slept on a camp bed beneath a mosquito net. You might think of this as a form of hell. Tieghi-Walker describes it as “fun” – a romanticised version of 70s New York when artists pioneered loft living.
For Tieghi-Walker, business is pleasure. When he hosts openings for his exhibitions – typically featuring design pieces and handmade craft – for his namesake gallery, TIWA Select, guests move between the front and back of the apartment; public and private areas, respectively. “In my head, the back would always be the sort of cosy, intimate living area and the front would be this big empty space,” he says. They are separated by an adjoining open-plan chrome kitchen, where people gravitate. “My only bit of privacy in the entire space is this tiny little room,” he says, gesturing to a hidden storage wall recast as a tool shed. The gallery is open to the public twice a week and by appointment, offering what he hopes is “a space that makes people feel at ease. I want it to feel inviting,” he says.
But living in a commercial building has its trade-offs. “There are no quick showers,” he says with a hearty laugh, having spent the last year walking 10 minutes to a nearby gym anytime he wants to rinse off. A cast-iron bathtub he sourced on Craigslist has taken the place of a shower, though it takes 15 minutes to fill up. “My entire life is about having experiences,” he says, “which is why I live spontaneously the way I do.”
When I visit, the gallery is showing Rites of Spring, a two-person exhibition featuring the works of Aaron Angell, a ceramicist from London who has made 20 glazed vessels filled with flowers, flanked by hanging lighting works made with sewn hemp silk by the Brooklyn-based design studio Cadis. Separated by a partition wall with antique-looking wood planks and glass window panes, the rear living area has a custom-built daybed, thrifted wood tables, curios, bric-a-brac and bookshelves lined with glass vases by contemporary maker Dana Arbib, whose work is informed by her Libyan heritage.
Looking back, Tieghi-Walker thinks his collector instincts were shaped by his childhood in Wales. Raised by a “very creative family,” it was “not luxurious”, but it was “very culturally rich. There’s something about Britain being so grey and cold that I think makes people there very colourful.”
His British mother and grandparents spent time in the Seychelles, Gambia and India, filling their home with collections of ceramics, gemstones and sculptures they picked up along the way. “In the house I was brought up in, the entrance hall was bright yellow, my mom’s study was pink, the sitting room was orange. All the doors on the upstairs landing were painted a different colour.”
When he was nine years old he moved with his mother, a professor, to Milan, to be closer to his Italian father, a ceramicist. He spent weekends with her travelling by train to various parts of the country, exploring everything from the Alps to ancient Roman ruins. “My entire childhood was spent looking at pretty stuff, which I’m sure had some sort of influence on everything I’ve done since. The idea of being surrounded by beauty is something my mother really instilled in me.”
This early-onset wanderlust inspired a sense of adventure and jouissance that has never left him. “I like having objects, because each object reminds me of an experience I’ve had,” he says. His home-gallery is littered with mementos and items he’s collected, from decorative and functional cups, to “tens and tens” of chairs, to an antique table he found while driving cross-country from LA to New York. “If I have someone over for a glass of wine, I’m like, ‘pick a mug’ and I can tell them what the backstory of that is.”
Tieghi-Walker spent a year in India before attending university in Buenos Aires, followed by a job working in Venice for the Biennale, jumpstarting a career in London’s publishing industry, working for magazines like Nowness and Dazed, where he stayed until age 26. “Often when I travel, I look at where I am through the lens of craft and the objects that you find in those places,” he says. By chance, a friend invited him to manage creative projects for Scribe Winery in Northern California, where he ended up putting down roots, first in Napa then in Berkeley. “I found Northern California really special because it reminds me of Wales in a way,” he says, noting that the two locales have a shared connection to misty, forested landscapes and liberal politics. “There’s also this incredible connection to craft which resonated with me,” he says. He eventually made his way to Los Angeles, and finally to New York.
A visit to Japan for a friends’ wedding was a pivotal moment, initiating the jump to start his own gallery. “Visiting different makers and seeing the way that people curate shops,” he says, also led to the name of his eponymous gallery. “Japan has what are called ‘select shops’ – they sell what the owner is interested in. I was like, ‘I want to open a select shop.’ I could collect objects that I thought were charming and magical and playful. And that’s still why the gallery is the way it is.”
A sense of place has helped shape his curatorial programming for TIWA Select – and the objects he collects for himself. If his personal aesthetic skews towards the eclectic, his taste is defined by an old world, Italian sensibility, one of worn-in patinas with a lived-in feel. “I’m not really attached to luxury per se,” he says. “I would prefer a wonky, rickety school table that has soul and character to something that feels polished and shiny.”
When I ask about how he selects artists to exhibit, Tieghi-Walker says, “one of the gallery’s manifestos is to work with artists who are also resourceful.” A hanging light by sculptor James Cherry, who works with recycled materials, is made with twigs he gathered from Central Park. Lamp fixtures by Cadis are made with scraps of reclaimed hemp silk that are naturally dyed.
“A lot of the artists I work with are a bit like me – they find their materials,” Tieghi-Walker says. “I think there’s just so much waste. There’s enough stuff in the world, so let’s reclaim what we can.”
Artists like Vince Skelly, who works with wood he found after a thunderstorm in his native Southern California, to ceramicist Jim McDowell, a North Carolina-based artist who makes stoneware face jugs, are all part of Tieghi-Walker’s curatorial vision. Their pieces are artfully arranged around the personal areas and kitchen. “I could go very commercial, but I always keep it very weird,” he says. “These are things that I find joy in.”
For more information, go to tiwa-select.com
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