MAX ABOODY INTERIORS
ELSEWHERE
This room began with the idea of creating a place at home that feels genuinely separate from everyday life. So much of the way we live now happens in overlapping spaces. Living rooms bleed into kitchens, home offices are never far away, and it can be difficult to press pause. I wanted to create a room that exists apart from the demands of daily life; a space devoted entirely to retreat, leisure, and letting the mind wander.
There is a luxury in having a room whose purpose is simply to help you disconnect. Not in a quiet, meditative sense, but through atmosphere. The room is bold, immersive, and intentionally removed from the visual language of the rest of the home. Once you enter, there should be a feeling that you have stepped into a slightly different world.
That idea of escape connects to my long-standing interest in retro space-age design. I’ve always been drawn to its playfulness, optimism, and willingness to imagine something beyond the familiar. The repeated circular forms throughout the room nod loosely to records, cassettes and CD's, while giving the architecture a graphic, almost futuristic rhythm. Executing those forms in walnut brings warmth and refinement to something that could otherwise feel more novelty-driven, while the perforated shutters filter daylight and create the darker, more atmospheric quality I wanted.
The materials heighten that sense of experience. Heavy velvet drapery absorbs light and sound while bringing richness and tactility to the room. Its depth and movement sit in sharp contrast to the stainless steel wall unit, which feels cooler, cleaner, and more futuristic. The wallpaper was conceived almost as a view outward, like looking onto a strange landscape from somewhere beyond it. The bar becomes its own jewel-box moment: glossy, saturated, and deliberately indulgent.
The room is maximalist, but not for the sake of excess. The intensity is part of the escape. Rather than trying to quiet the senses by removing stimulation, the design redirects them. Color, texture, light, music, and reflection create a contained environment where the mind can loosen its grip on everything happening outside of it.
The sensory intensity of the room is less about quieting the mind than redirecting its energy, leaving you inspired, recharged, and recalibrated.
Max Aboody is the founder and principal of Max Aboody Interiors, a boutique residential design studio based in Dumbo, Brooklyn, designing full-home interiors across New York City, the Hamptons, Long Island, Westchester, and the greater tri-state area. Before founding MAI in 2015, Max studied womenswear design at Parsons and trained in couture ateliers, an experience that continues to inform his sensitivity to proportion, material, detail, and the way a space is composed.
His process starts with acknowledging the routines and patterns of how a client's household moves through the day and what they value most, then designs around those rhythms. Blending modern and traditional sensibilities, he builds each interior around custom furnishings alongside archival and artisanal pieces, giving each home a curated, collected presence that is as livable as it is beautiful. The result is a home that feels collected rather than decorated, expressive and entirely individual to the people who live there, designed to enhance the experience of everyday life.
