Do you like your room?” the designer Ariel Ashe, one half of the New York–based AD100 firm Ashe Leandro, asked a demanding client one bright morning in Manhattan. The client proceeded to throw himself onto the floor, reach into a basket full of plushy toys, and begin tossing them all over the place. Would that be a yes? To clarify any misunderstanding, he then erupted into an epic giggle fit that suggested nothing short of sheer joy.
Count him as another satisfied Ashe Leandro customer. They tend, like this happy guy, toward the young and creative, including actor Liev Schreiber (AD, June 2018), artist Rashid Johnson, La Ligne cofounder Meredith Melling, and Coldplay guitarist Jonny Buckland. They also, inevitably, end up feeling like family, thanks to Ashe and partner Reinaldo Leandro’s hands-on, relaxed approach. In the present case, “family” is just what we’re talking about. The dude rolling around the floor is Ashe’s excruciatingly adorable two-year-old nephew. His mother is Ariel’s younger sister, the human-rights attorney Alexi Ashe Meyers. His father is Seth Meyers, as in Late Night with. And the room—sun-drenched and smartly outfitted with bent-ply furniture—is on the top floor of the couple’s eight-room duplex in a redbrick prewar in Greenwich Village.
The Meyerses, who married in 2013, bought the place in 2016 and got down to business in order to accommodate their growing family and demanding professional lives. (Alexi works with Sanctuary for Families, a nonprofit devoted to helping victims of domestic and gender-based violence.) “This was not your typical New York gut renovation,” Leandro says, “but rather a strategic renovation.” It took all of about three months. With laser-targeted interventions (bright white paint, cutting an archway here and there, crafting a family-friendly living-dining area), the partners utterly transformed the 3,200-square-foot space while accentuating its Manhattan aura.There’s an open flow, with rooms bathed in light, and furnishings from the duo’s recently launched line, Ruemmler, including split-backed oak dining chairs, a handsome oak-burl console, and pendant lighting in cinched amber silk. Bespoke detailing reveals the team’s gossamer touch—proper materials, properly handled. Consider the gorgeously milled balusters on the staircase and the soft curves of the mantelpieces, done in gray Pietra Cardoso stone. The overall vibe is pared-down without being severe, tailored without being uptight.
Like all Ashe Leandro projects, the Meyers residence is not a showplace: It’s a home. It added one more occupant last April, when Alexi delivered the couple’s second child, another boy, in the building’s lobby. Ashe Leandro, who are known for making kid spaces cool, jumped in to help the expanded family accommodate its newest member. “A lot of our clients are creative,” Ashe says, “and they don’t want their kids to have a boring room. And kids’ rooms can be so boring and repetitive—a blue room for a boy and a pink room for a girl.”
Alexi describes her sister as “the best aunt,” and Leandro is every bit the besotted honorary uncle. “People have always asked us if we’re married,” Leandro says. (For the record: They are not.) The two met at the New York design firm Pierce Allen in 2005 and hit it off. Both of them had builder-developers for fathers; design was in their DNA. Light was always important to Leandro, who grew up in Caracas, Venezuela, amid tropical modernism, in which rigorous design flows from a Spanish Colonial tradition. Ashe grew up in Placitas, New Mexico, land of adobe and sun. “We both have this very earthy, informed-by-nature background,” Leandro says. Ashe adds, “We have the same tastes, and if one of us is stuck, the other can usually pull the other one out.”
Leandro had a stint at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, enlarging his scope and sharpening his chops, while Ashe had one at Saturday Night Live, doing set design (the Seth Meyers connection). They got Ashe Leandro off the ground in 2008, quickly becoming ingenues of downtown style, attracting the cool and the celebrated. No surprise. The duo—young, good-looking, smart, chic, unpretentious—have star quality themselves. Eleven years on, they’re juggling multiple projects of all sizes all over the city, as well as getaways in the Hamptons and on Martha’s Vineyard. “We’ve certainly grown,” Leandro says. “But we’re still a small, boutique firm.” (The operation now numbers eight.)
Alexi and Seth are, naturally, repeat clients. “I just trust them so implicitly,” Alexi says. “The only input I give is, like, ‘I want the silverware drawer across from the dishwasher.’ ” Even so, Ashe has occasionally resorted to the tactical element of surprise—ambush, even. She had the couple’s TV room repainted a deep terra-cotta while they were away: “They would have said no if I’d asked!” she says. “Seth hates everything at first—and then he loves it.”
His sister-in-law does have a high success rate, going back to Seth’s bachelor pad, which Ashe made livable, and on to his office and greenroom at Studio 8G and the couple’s weekend house in Connecticut. “It would have been a pretty gnarly situation,” Seth says, pondering existence without her design input. “It would be hard to comprehend what my interiors would look like without the Ashes in my life.” Alexi chimes in, “Rei and Ariel are the luckiest people in the world to work with each other.” She applauds their happy partnership. “And it’s great,” she says, calling out another important client benefit, “that when sister egos get in the way, I can just text Rei and take Ariel out of it!”
