Solange Knowles has at all times been the epitome of cool, and her modern loft equally matches her fly. The singer-songwriter and Latest 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 in line with Knowles, she’s owned the apartment since she was 19 and has grown up alongside the space. 

Contained in the space, you’ll see eclectic Black art, her unique furniture designs, and a country color palate that inspires rest, ease, and creativity. We’ve learned from Knowles how vital nomadic living is to her with the 2016 album A Seat At The Table. Nevertheless, 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 transient time, and I used to be doing quite a lot of songwriting for other artists. I might bring my son, who was one or two years old, to LA for these recording sessions. As my profession as a songwriter grew, I wanted to seek out a spot where we could have a bit more grounding, a house life there with more stable roots,” she said. 

Knowles used the apartment to change into more grounded and located inspiration inside her environment to conceptualize her first album in 2008, Sol-Angel Hadley St.Streams there. Some features of Knowles’ home, like her Japanese soaking tub, have fostered imagination and inventive exploration for her projects. The bathtub 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 actually stands out to me, oddly enough, is the tub. It’s a Japanese soaking tub. It completely immerses you as much as your neck in water, just with you sitting. And I do most of my writing, conception, and ideation for performances and installations in the tub. I feel like this space taught me the facility of making in proximity to water,” Knowles revealed. 

Through 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 determining recent ways to specific my design language and encompass all of my ideas and ideals into objects. I began working on the sofa for my creative collective, Saint Heron, and the primary prototype of it’s within the space. I desired to create a modular piece with different variations, starting with the circle, which may be very sacred to me,” she said.

Knowles desired to curate an accessible space and furniture that made her feel good. “I wanted to make use of velvet, a fabric that was durable and tactile enough to live in, spill things on, draw on—not too precious but still having just a little little bit of luxe-ness that just makes you’re feeling good. And that color brown has been a continuing in my work, embodying the thought of living among the many soil and the land,” she shared.

Through her interior design work within the loft, Knowles connected her interests with family lineage and history; she was conceived in Egypt, which makes quite a lot of sense. Several tables and lamps within the loft reflect her interest in geometry and pyramids (she has a circle and pyramid tattoo). You would possibly’ve noticed each 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 inside her home. 

As an extended supporter of other Black artists, Black women specifically, it might only be right to have Black artists featured inside her home. Knowles has quite the art collection. From Robert Pruitt, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Elliott Jerome Brown Jr., to Alison Saar, it’s the right mixture of representation of all art mediums. 

Knowles’ intentional design decisions span past taste and head straight into sophisticated storytelling on a visceral and spiritual level, showing how she perceives the world round her and the way she decides to take up space. “In my home, I definitely need to feel drawn to an object in a metaphysical, spiritual way, where it seems like I can’t live without it. I depend on these objects to show me things about myself and to reflect things in me that I would like to hearken to and work on. I actually look to all of those as things that I would depart by myself personal altars, or if I were to be gone, what I might wish to be a representation of who I used to be and what I believed in,” she said. 

She also believes that her house is one in all 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 different periods of my life, all of different people and energies. Regardless of where I’ve gone or moved or the chums or relationships which have are available in or out of my life, this loft has at all times been a spot of home.”