over the top
New York City: Jim Walrod is the most famous interior designer you have never heard of. Since opening his first shop on a desolate block on Lafayette Street in 1987, he has developed relationships with the widest range of legendary New York characters. If you’re an old-school rapper, graffiti artist, painter of cotton candy, builder of foam core lunar landers, motorcycle racing cult director, dashing hotelier or infamous downtown fashion photographer, then of course you know who Jim is. Mike D of the Beastie Boys famously called Jim his ‘furniture pimp’, yet any top decorator in the world, who would literally kill for his clients, would have no idea who Jim was. Why? Because Jim flies under the radar in nearly everything he does. This below-the-radar style is what enables Jim to continue to have the sharpest eye for the next greatest forgotten designs, making him one of the most sought-after designers for the most sought-after clients who appreciate Jim’s particular bricolage of the modern and post-modern decorative art worlds. Mind you this all might be changing: Jim is in negotiations to be the host of a new television show in which he and his non-decorator friends drive around the country discovering forgotten and undiscovered modernist homes. But before he enters the realm of household celebrity and his cover is blown, Jim and I sat down for a chat in his Chinatown loft that he shares with the lovely Mara and his sassy Cairn terrier, Tito.