Inside an apartment fit for Instagram

By Charlie McCann

When Dmitry Reutov, a Russian architect and designer, was asked by a couple to redecorate their apartment in Manhattan, he leapt at the opportunity. Clients often have firm ideas about what they want but these ones gave him carte blanche to do as he pleased. They had found his work on Instagram and liked what they saw: apartments dip-dyed in colours so brilliant that they look like sets from a Wes Anderson film.

Reutov finds his palettes in the wild, from the glistening greens and blues of Chinese bamboo groves to the rust red craters of Lanzarote’s volcanic landscape. For the Manhattan apartment, he turned to the colours he found in the Chihuahan desert of north Mexico, drawing out the mint of the cacti and the pink of the adobe houses stippling the dusty scrublands. He applied this shade of green to the floor and to the polyurethane cylinders marking the divide between the living room and kitchen (the vertical lines of which evoke the arms of cacti). He painted the walls of the kitchen and living room pink and coral to suggest the baked exteriors of adobe huts, and designed a stepped storage unit for the bedroom, which looks like the blocky outline of a multi-storey adobe structure. And for the bedroom, an ombre wallpaper that conjures the wispy blues and pinks streaking the sky during sunset. #nofilter needed – except Dmitry Reutov’s imagination.■