Mickey Cartin spent four decades assembling an art collection that is as sprawling as it is eclectic. At his Greenwich Village loft, he enlisted the Dutch architect Ben van Berkel to design a home around the works while his longtime curator Steven Holmes was in charge of the placement of this treasure trove. The collector‘s 5,800-square-foot residence is now on the market for $10,000,000, while more than 80 works will be offered at a series of sales at Christie’s in New York, London, and Paris starting next month and running through July 2027. The line up includes a Giorgio de Chirico self-portrait ($400,000–$600,000), a Roman Opałka canvas ($180,000–$250,000), and a Renaissance manual on eye surgery, to name a few.
Inside the 12 East 12th Street space, Cartin liked to mix it up: A minimalist Agnes Martin painting might appear alongside a 16th-century Madonna or a psychedelic resin piece by Fred Tomaselli. “That makes complete sense for Mickey and for the collection,” Holmes tells CULTURED. “The works would simply communicate with each other.” Cartin had little interest in organizing his collection by period or medium, and Holmes took his cues from the collector’s instincts.
Van Berkel, who became friendly with Cartin through the board of Connecticut‘s Wadsworth Atheneum Museum, brought that same sensibility to the apartment’s design. After considering several properties, they settled on a loft inside a 1907 pre-war building in Greenwich Village, where the architect set about balancing the demands of an extraordinary collection with the leisures of daily life. “He wanted to have a place where he could read and calm down, and to have a kind of privacy with his books,” van Berkel says.
The residence features an 80-foot-long great room, gallery spaces, and a serpentine-style library, with southern views of One World Trade Center. A series of curving partitions carve distinct spaces from an otherwise open floor plan. Cartin’s family business is in electrical supply, so lighting was a major focus. The architect introduced a luminous Newmat ceiling membrane that shifts between warm and cool tones, alongside precisely positioned spotlights and illuminated library shelves.
The two-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bathroom apartment could be reconfigured in all sorts of ways by the next owner, but van Berkel hopes they will appreciate the architectural experiment already in place. “You’re buying—if you buy this place—a holistic artwork, if you believe that architecture could also be an artwork,” he says.
His one request for the next owner? “Hopefully, the person might want to keep in touch with me.”
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