Celebrity Homes: Inside Cassie Arison’s NYC Home

Establishing a home in one of New York’s less-bustling neighbourhoods is no easy feat. However, the design team from Grade New York easily stepped up to the challenge to fully renovate a beautiful home for Cassie Arison.

Despite its perfect location just north of Tribeca, SoHo’s far west side has always felt like an afterthought. Gritty and industrial—a warren of warehouses and manufacturing facilities—the area now known as Hudson Square, has little of the heavy foot traffic or fancy retail crowding of other nearby areas.

However, the sheer realism of Hudson Square has long appealed to Cassie Arison, a Miami-born, Tel Aviv-raised, creatively inclined publisher and philanthropist. “When I initially got to New York a decade ago, I lived in a loft on far west Broome Street,” Arison explains. Ted Arison, her grandfather, founded Carnival Cruise Line in 1972. “It was wonderful to be able to sit by the window and watch my family’s ships sail away.” This was the inspiration for Cassie Arison’s fully renovated home.

At the time, Cassie was splitting her time between New York and Israel, where her family runs a range of businesses and where she co-founded the Middle Eastern culture and design-focused AsPromised magazine. In Israel, she inhabits a light-filled apartment tucked within a converted 19th-century convent and hospital. Renovated and restored by minimalist British architect John Pawson, the home is set in Tel Aviv’s ancient, sea-front Jaffa district—the bible-era port from which Jonah set out for his ill-fated tussle with a whale.

Easts Meets West

“My roots extend very deep into this Mediterranean aesthetic,” Cassie says of Israel’s mix of Ottoman, Arabian, and European design sensibilities. “I’ve always been fascinated by this juxtaposition between East and West—and by finding a middle ground between the two.”

That middle ground ultimately took her back to Hudson Square and to a ground-up glass-and-aluminum–clad development designed by Renzo Piano. With so much Israeli architecture skewing modern and new, she says she initially envisioned settling into something more historic and prewar in Manhattan.

But the Piano provenance—and flexibility of a new-build tower—proved irresistible. Cassie, therefore, closed on a pair of residences in 2019, with the plan of creating a permanent home for herself and her husband Niv Alexander, a one-time journalist and former marketing director at the Jerusalem Foundation, and their red standard poodle June. The residences, coincidentally, were just across the street from the Broome Street loft which first lured her to the area a decade prior.

Although Cassie may be considered ambitious, she certainly did need help on the design front. She called on the services of Edward Yedid and Thomas Hickey, the worldly and sophisticated duo behind the architecture and interiors firm Grade New York. Not only were Yedid and Hickey open to Cassie’s vision—Provençal-inspired kitchen? Check! Boudoir-like dressing room? Of course! That foliage-filled solarium? Why not!—but their office was also right down the street.

Bringing inspiration to life

“I was a little all over the place with inspirations, so I wasn’t entirely sure Eddie and Thomas would take me seriously,” Arison says. “But they’re completely serious about their level of design and detail. Plus,” she continues, “they know the neighbourhood and understand its energy. Everything just clicked.”

For Yedid and Hickey, the apartment’s first order of business was, perhaps, its most challenging: Mapping out Arison’s must-have solarium. “It was a big ask but we were able to work with the developer to make it happen,” Yedid says of the complicated design changes they requested to the developer, which included drilling straight through to the tower’s core. “We had to do some major internal rearranging while also incorporating and respecting the parameters of Piano’s design.”

The resulting home, which spans some 5,000 square feet and includes two bedrooms less than its original four, is anchored by a sun-drenched, gallery-like living room laden with a precisely curated selection of contemporary artwork.

A few statement pieces

The most show-stopping piece is arguably Dan Flavin’s 1971 piece Untitled (to Donna 6), a towering blue, pink, and yellow fluorescent frame that fits, with almost unimaginable precision, into one of Piano’s curved corner windows.

A curved corner window is also one of the most prominent features of the home’s great room. It was subsequently designed to maximize the impact of architect Renzo Piano’s work. A vintage 1970s Mario Bellini modular mohair velvet Camaleonda sofa from 1stDibs, Tuomas Markunpoika’s Contra Naturam coffee table via Galerie Fumi, vintage 1955 gold-plated metal Mathieu Matégot folded magazine stand for Artimeta, and a Vincenzo De Cotiis DC1817 coffee table vase from Carpenter Workshop Gallery are notable highlights.

The Pierre Paulin vintage Pacha love seat dates back to 1975. Though covered by furniture, Thomas Hickey says the carpet is particularly scene-stealing: “It has a lot of pattern, a lot of texture, so it subtly and softly competes with the rest of the room while never overwhelming it.”