A Storied Downtown New York Architecture Gallery Finds New Life

Along with his partner Clara Syme, Owen Nichols has moved into his father’s former exhibition space in New York City and has remade it as a home for life and art.

Dec 8, 2022 - 23:17

A Storied Downtown New York Architecture Gallery Finds New Life

Along with his partner Clara Syme, Owen Nichols has moved into his father’s former exhibition space in New York City and has remade it as a home for life and art.

The apartment is filled with designerly touches, from a cutout of a Michael Graves drawing (Owen’s mother, Karen, is a principal at Michael Graves Architecture & Design) to a Cold Picnic rug.

Inside a83, one of New York City’s few architectural galleries, personal and professional wires don’t just get crossed—they get tangled.

Founders Owen Nichols and Clara Syme run their design studio, Chibbernoonie, out of the gallery’s Soho storefront. The couple share a small, efficient apartment at its rear with Busy, their frisky, wire-haired pup; in the adjacent office, a risograph printer resembling a copy machine spits out posters and proofs. In the basement, they have assembled a printshop from disparately procured equipment, including a jerry-rigged screen-printing machine and an embosser. Down here also rests the a83 archive, which contains some 10,000 prints, proofs, and ephemera—much of it inherited from Owen’s father, printmaker John Nichols. He ran his gallery, John Nichols Printmakers (JNP), in the building from the late 1970s to 1994, before renting the space out to other gallerists. After taking the lease over in 2020, Owen and Clara returned the archive to 83 Grand Street, undid changes made by former tenants, and made their fair share of upgrades; a recent rewiring job—a gray conifer of cables Clara jokingly calls "our beautiful conduit tree"— sums up the snarly connections of their practice.

Owen and Clara reside in an apartment at the back of a83. The bedroom lofts over a kitchen and living area.

Skylights bring in plenty of diffuse daylight into the double-height space.

"We’re trying to replicate it as it was," says Owen about having a83 channel the energy of when the space exhibited work by Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Albert Pope, and others. "Antoine Predock, the LA architect, filled the gallery with three cubic yards of sand. Jesse Reiser, of Reiser+Umemoto, did his first show here in 1987, and he and [partner] Nanako just exhibited with us. So it makes sense to foreground the history of this place against the new projects we’re doing."

"Or maybe to ‘side-ground’ the history," Clara adds, "so that the old and new work begin to run parallel to one another."

The couple’s design office prefigured both their relationship and a83, cofounded with the curator and writer Phillip Denny (who has since left the gallery).