Carolyn Alexander spent fifty years as a collector and gallerist in New York, much of it running the Manhattan gallery Alexander and Bonin. When her business partner Ted Bonin died in 2023, she closed the gallery and began the slower work of dismantling a lifetime's collection: some paintings and prints went to museums, others went to auction. She kept a few dozen pieces that really spoke to her — works by Donald Judd, Josef Albers, Ree Morton and Sylvia Plimack Mangold, artists whose careers she had helped shape.

The question was where to put them. Alexander's answer was her 1,375-square-foot two-bedroom apartment in London Terrace, the century-old full-block compound in Chelsea. She hired architect Martin Cox of Bade Stageberg Cox and interior designer Alexandra Loew — two people who had never met — and asked them to make the rooms hold hundreds of art books and exhibition catalogues, a collection of small ceramics gathered on foreign travels, and the chosen artworks without clutter. The design, Loew says, should 'celebrate the essence of each piece.'

The scheme took its cues from four untitled Donald Judd woodcuts Alexander had selected for above the fireplace. The team replaced the fireplace's oversized red-brick front with fluted light-gray marble whose parallel lines echo the Judd prints, then designed a dozen oak built-ins with identical elements in slightly different configurations — 'subtle iterations within a given framework,' as Loew puts it. Bleu de Savoie marble shelves at windowsill level tie the rooms together and display the ceramics.

Elsewhere the apartment reads as a catalogue of Alexander's eye: rebar chairs by Franz West with African-fabric cushions around a circa-1800 English refectory table, objects by Tom Otterness and Ken Price, a Sylvia Plimack Mangold painting, a Petrit Halilaj sculpture in the study, and a Jasper Johns print above the bed next to a piece by Ree Morton, the feminist minimalist whose career Alexander helped guide. The Introspective feature, published October 16, 2026, frames it as a fifty-year career condensed into a single address.