Naeem Khan’s daring, intricately embellished couture, favored by the likes of Michelle Obama, Sarah Jessica Parker and Beyoncé, radiates an opulent mannequin of glamour. Nevertheless the evening placed on and marriage ceremony ceremony costume wizard moreover has a knack for home design, and his Miami penthouse fully expresses the dynamism for which he is recognized.
When the Manhattan-based sartorialist bought a second home throughout the Magic Metropolis’s arts and leisure district in 2008, he says, it was “fully on an impulse.” The 4,500-square-foot, glass-walled, three-bedroom triplex was a raw home then, nonetheless trying over Biscayne Bay from the apartment’s Forty eighth-floor roof deck, he knew that its bones have been explicit. “You merely actually really feel corresponding to you are flying,” he describes. “It is sort of a glass subject up throughout the sky.” The Mumbai native moreover felt an affinity with the city’s tropical setting and immigrant-driven arts-and-crafts custom.
For him, the apartment home is analogous further to a model than to a garment. “My apartment I see as a physique,” he says, explaining that he views it as a neutral stage for an evolving wardrobe of decor. His design targets, as a result of this reality, have been minimalism, openness and transparency.
He laid down wide-plank, warm-toned oak flooring and put in crisp white partitions and ceilings. “I’m so used to color in my pattern that I wanted one factor a bit completely completely different,” he explains. “Usually having an extreme quantity of shade spherical you could be overwhelming. White is an I-can-think shade.”
To create an open kitchen, he knocked out the partitions between the tiny earlier kitchen, closets and former bathroom. “I put together dinner,” Khan says. “I wanted it to be an unlimited kitchen the place I can entertain.” The kitchen flows proper right into a lofty entrance room, whose 20-foot ceiling is anchored by an 11-foot-high chandelier that Khan commissioned from the Crystal Retailer in Delhi, to evoke the Nineteenth-century F&C Osler chandeliers that grace the palaces of India.
The glowing pièce de résistance catches the glint of bubbly that Khan likes to pour for buddies. He is a longtime devotee of Krug Champagne, notably the Grande Cuvée, first made throughout the mid-Nineteenth century and launched yearly as a mixture of 10 or further harvests, with grapes from 120 completely completely different base wines, according to Krug. Khan is fascinated by the historic previous of it, of a winery with vines that predate Marie Antoinette.
He has even begun web internet hosting occasional Krug dinners for admirers of his pattern label. The first was at Francis Mallman’s Wine Spectator Higher of Award of Excellence winner Los Fuegos in March 2016. Alinea chef Grant Achatz cooked, and the invite report included friends like Tommy Hilfiger.
When Khan entertains at home, he says, “Wine models the tempo.” He outlets 300 of his 1,000 complete bottles in Miami (the rest are in his New York loft), and he often pulls a Champagne to start or end the meal. His home cooking reveals a prodigious world range, from American to Italian to Indian to Thai to Iranian. Peppery, juicy Zinfandels work fantastically alongside along with his richly spiced Indian dishes; he is notably eager on The Prisoner’s namesake Zinfandel combine. “It’s a tremendous large wine, and I like that,” he says. Daring Napa Cabernets from Pahlmeyer, Cakebread and Duckhorn make appearances, and alternate options from Tuscany and Bordeaux spherical out his favorites.
Khan’s buddies are generally dealt with to the all-encompassing cloud-borne affect of his rooftop terrace, whose 2,800 sq. toes of coral concrete embody a jewel subject of a pool and a consuming cabana.
In current occasions, Khan has been engaged on an unlimited new problem: making able to maneuver his agency headquarters, atelier and manufacturing hub from New York to Miami. He estimates that almost 90 p.c of the ornate embroidery and beadwork on his robes is completed by hand—for the time being at locations in Italy, Paris, New York and Mumbai. As a result of the garment enterprise has embraced mass manufacturing, the form of artisan handiwork, which his family has carried out for virtually a century, has begun to die, he says. He feels it’s his obligation to keep up the craft alive—and “I wanted to hold jobs once more to this nation.”
Due to Miami’s mutual must promote job creation, he can. In 2014, he signed a below-market-value, 90-year lease on an ex-industrial portside stretch of the Miami River. His new facilities, which is ready to embody a model new design faculty, are slated to open in 2020, in a switch that he hopes will lead a fashion-driven monetary and cultural renaissance in Miami.
When that time comes, will most likely be eminent set off for celebration—and no person pops the Champagne pretty like Naeem Khan.