Solange Knowles has always been the epitome of cool, and her modern loft equally matches her fly. The singer-songwriter and New York City Ballet composer recently invited Apartmento Magazine inside her sprawling home overlooking Downtown Hollywood. The surrealist, spacey, luxe art deco landscape is an aesthetically pleasing oasis, and according to Knowles, she’s owned the apartment since she was 19 and has grown up alongside the space.
Inside the space, you’ll see eclectic Black art, her unique furniture designs, and a rustic color palate that inspires rest, ease, and creativity. We’ve learned from Knowles how important nomadic living is to her with the 2016 album A Seat At The Table. However, her intention for this apartment was to be grounded after experiencing several life transitions. “I had moved with my son back to Houston after living in Idaho for a brief time, and I was doing a lot of songwriting for other artists. I would bring my son, who was one or two years old, to LA for these recording sessions. As my career as a songwriter grew, I wanted to find a place where we could have a bit more grounding, a home life there with more stable roots,” she said.
Knowles used the apartment to become more grounded and found inspiration within her environment to conceptualize her first album in 2008, Sol-Angel Hadley St.Streams there. Some aspects of Knowles’ home, like her Japanese soaking tub, have fostered imagination and creative exploration for her projects. The tub has influenced her deep connection to water, highlighted in video projects like “Almeda.” Her artistic work and living space are intrinsically connected – a symbiotic relationship.
“One thing that really stands out to me, oddly enough, is the bathtub. It’s a Japanese soaking tub. It completely immerses you up to your neck in water, just with you sitting. And I do most of my writing, conception, and ideation for performances and installations in the bathtub. I feel like this space taught me the power of creating in proximity to water,” Knowles revealed.
Over the years, Knowles has been known to reinvent herself personally and professionally – and that metamorphosis continues with home decor and furniture designing. “I’ve been figuring out new ways to express my design language and encompass all of my ideas and ideals into objects. I started working on the sofa for my creative collective, Saint Heron, and the first prototype of it is in the space. I wanted to create a modular piece with different variations, starting with the circle, which is very sacred to me,” she said.
Knowles wanted to curate an accessible space and furniture that made her feel good. “I wanted to use velvet, a material that was durable and tactile enough to live in, spill things on, draw on—not too precious but still having a little bit of luxe-ness that just makes you feel good. And that color brown has been a constant in my work, embodying the idea of living among the soil and the land,” she shared.
Through her interior design work in the loft, Knowles connected her interests with family lineage and history; she was conceived in Egypt, which makes a lot of sense. Several tables and lamps in the loft reflect her interest in geometry and pyramids (she has a circle and pyramid tattoo). You might’ve noticed both motifs in her work – specifically the “Things I Imagined / Down with the Clique” music video. It made sense to have several geometric-shaped decor items within her home.
As a long supporter of other Black artists, Black women specifically, it would only be right to have Black artists featured within her home. Knowles has quite the art collection. From Robert Pruitt, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Elliott Jerome Brown Jr., to Alison Saar, it’s the perfect mixture of representation of all art mediums.
Knowles’ intentional design choices span past taste and head straight into sophisticated storytelling on a visceral and spiritual level, showing how she perceives the world around her and how she decides to take up space. “In my home, I definitely have to feel drawn to an object in a metaphysical, spiritual way, where it feels like I can’t live without it. I rely on these objects to teach me things about myself and to reflect things in me that I need to listen to and work on. I really look to all of these as things that I would leave on my own personal altars, or if I were to be gone, what I would want to be a representation of who I was and what I believed in,” she said.
She also believes that her home is one of her life’s most constant things. After leading an intensive nomadic lifestyle, the singer feels cemented by how she created her interior world through architecture and decor. “It’s really beautiful to look back on the loft throughout all the different periods of my life, all of the different people and energies. No matter where I’ve gone or moved or the friends or relationships that have come in or out of my life, this loft has always been a place of home.”
