Step Inside This Art-Insider’s Chicago Family Home

There are no quick visits with Chicago couple Kavi Gupta and Jessica Moss. At any time that curators, collectors, or artists fall by Gupta’s namesake Washington Boulevard gallery—the initially two flooring of an industrial making in the West Loop—they inevitably make their way to the couple’s residence upstairs, where Moss will inquire if any person cares for a nosh, and Gupta will dive into his wine selection. On a latest pay a visit to, as speak strayed from interior layout to the long run of the art market, he uncorked a rosé, a Sancerre, and a Syrah. It was daylight as the tour started and practically midnight as it finished.

When Gupta acquired the creating in the late ’90s, he recalls, “my aspiration was to have a salon-model space.” He refurbished the interiors and opened his gallery in 2000, settling into a bachelor pad on the second level to which he in the long run extra yet another tale, generating a form of mega loft. “There had been hardly any doors, and they have been to the bogs,” remembers Moss, who moved in 6 yrs later. The pair married in 2008, and Moss, an artwork historian and curator, joined the gallery in 2017, where by she is now principal and head of exhibitions. Representing modern day artists who include Jessica Stockholder, Mickalene Thomas, and founding associates of the AFRICOBRA group, this sort of as Jae and Wadsworth Jarrell, Kavi Gupta|Chicago has expanded to a complete of five exhibition spaces, with a few properties in Chicago and 1 in New Buffalo, Michigan. There is also a conservation and investigation archive and a publishing division.

At dwelling, Gupta and Moss also manufactured incremental alterations, like the addition of bedrooms when their daughter, Lila, now an 11-yr-previous budding artist and critic, was born. This most current renovation was a whole-scale demolition and reimagining of the third flooring, overseen by the regional company Jonathan Splitt Architects. Metal beams now reinforce the floors, supporting a trove of artworks that selection from a Deborah Kass piece on the new out of doors terrace (the starting of a sculpture back garden) to a Nick Cave Soundsuit created primarily for the living place. In the meantime, clerestory home windows and automated skylights bounce sunlight off the 14-foot walls, which ended up painted a crisp museum white.

Through the transformation, the couple’s enjoy of recurrent, impromptu guests was a important thought. “This is a pretty general public-experiencing area,” says Jennifer Kranitz, who took on the job while she was style and design director for the Chicago organization Venture Interiors. (She later on founded her personal apply, Set Setting Studio, but collaborated intently with her previous colleagues, as very well as Karin Wowk of KWOWK, on the task.) Moss’s ideal pal considering the fact that high school, Kranitz came into the project with an intimate knowledge of the family’s collection—the colours, the scale, the materiality—and furnished the rooms accordingly. “The design and style is quite a lot in provider to the art,” suggests Moss, noting a basic minimalism and restraint. Small-slung home furniture in shades of black, white, and gray will allow a lot more colorful  works to acquire center stage, together with the Angel Otero collage of oil-paint skins higher than the living area couch.

Somewhat than hope the loved ones to keep a customer-ready property at all situations, Kranitz devised what she phone calls a “fade-to-black” system for preserving their private outcomes out of sight. Ebony-stained millwork together a living-place wall, for example, hides space in which to stow muddle in the function of an sudden guest. In the kitchen area, darkish wood panels conceal the appliances and dinnerware. And in the lavatory off the dining space, the shower sits guiding dark reflective glass, disguising the house as a extra official powder area.