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Above: In the living/dining area of Maximilian Eicke and Irina’s SoHo home, the carpet was designed by Maximilian using 12 runners purchased on Etsy. The stools are from Max ID NY’s home collection. The couch and armchair were designed and produced by Maximilian, and the coffee table was designed by Maximilian as a prototype.
The apartment that Maximilian Eicke and Irina Kro Eicke call home is technically a SoHo rental, but it feels more like a full-throttle creative compound. German-born Maximilian is a furniture and product designer with his own store, Max ID NY, while Irina, known online as @withkro, is a stylist and content creator. The couple spotted the 3,500-square-foot, ground-floor apartment—with a full basement and lofted sleeping areas—when it was listed for sale. Rather than putting in an offer, they asked to rent it (provided they could do cosmetic renovations).
“We wanted to upgrade the space so it fit what we wanted and why we moved to New York City,” Maximilian says. “We have no shame saying it’s a rental. We’re proud of it.”
Björn Wallander
In the double-height kitchen, an original spiral stair winds up to the lofted bedrooms. The solid teak root sculptural balls are from Bali.
Maximilian and Irina met in Bali eight years ago, as he was finishing up designing a house that became their first joint project. She brought what he calls “the best kind of input,” tweaking colors and textures with her fashion-trained eye. From Bali they moved to Sag Harbor, where they renovated an apartment, and then went on to complete a full home gut reno in Southampton. By the time SoHo entered the picture, they’d already treated multiple spaces as design laboratories.
The existing SoHo apartment layout matched their working styles with eerie precision. The ground floor, insulated from street noise and lit by a generous kitchen skylight, became the shared zone—living room, bar, kitchen, and Irina’s primary shooting backdrop. Below, the 1,500-square-foot basement serves as Maximilian’s workshop and archive. Above, two low-slung sleeping lofts tuck away their private life. “I like hiding away from the world at times,” Maximilian says.
The couple began renovations just as they sold the Southampton house. “For about the first two weeks we were sleeping just on a mattress in the living room,” Maximilian remembers. Their furniture arrived before they decided on paint colors, so they found themselves edging ladders around a 3,000‑pound marble dining table under 20-foot ceilings. “We should have just painted the whole space first and that would have solved weeks’ worth of trouble,” he notes.
Björn Wallander
In the dining area, a 3,000-pound marble dining table designed by Maximilian Eicke, carved from solid block marble. The paintings are by Angelica Kaufmann. The chairs and stools are designed by Maximilian for his brand, Max ID NY.
The marble dining table, an early piece Maximilian made, became the centerpiece of the ground floor, which hosts both dinner parties and product shoots. “I always saw this table in his Bridgehampton showroom and I always wanted to live with it,” Irina says. The only way to make that happen in the city was a ground-floor unit. “If we were in any other apartment in New York City, this would take a crane to bring in,” Maximilian says. “Because we’re on the ground, it literally came in straight through the front door.”
Under the table is another unique piece. The couple didn’t want to invest in a massive custom rug for the main living area right away, so Maximilian ordered 15 smaller runners from Etsy and, with Irina’s help, wove them into a single, oversized floor covering.
Björn Wallander
Off the bedroom, Maximilian lined Irina’s low-ceilinged makeup nook with overstock fashion fabrics and a custom-cut foam mattress. The red painting (left) is by Louisa Lizbeth Chase.
Upstairs, Irina’s sensibility comes through in softer, more intimate ways. Take her makeup nook—a low-ceilinged annex off the bedroom that “hoards” the apartment’s best daylight. With a ceiling under six feet, a standard desk didn’t look quite right, so the couple brought everything lower to the ground and added a window cushion. Maximilian sketched the footprint, walked up the block to a foam shop, and an hour later they had a custom design, dressed in linen and tented overhead with leftover fabrics. “I really like to do makeup when I’m sitting on the floor. It’s very comforting for me,” Irina says.
In the basement, Maximilian and Irina’s shared history in art and design is everywhere. An inexpensive billiard table became a one-off “couture” object after Maximilian spent an afternoon wrapping its base in Japanese paper from a local art store. He made the dramatic pendant overhead from a humble table lamp, an orphaned shade, and a plastic IKEA planter, all spray-painted and suspended from a hook. Maximilian’s furniture prototypes—like the triangular chair from his first collection and a spiky metal table—fill the rest of the space.
Step Inside This Moody SoHo Apartment
Open Gallery
On the walls are artworks from Maximilian’s parents, two retired longtime dealers. The pieces include canvases by English painter Newton Haydn ‘Tony’ Stubbing, who also designed furniture for the Stanley Kubrick film A Clockwork Orange. “We have all the original plaster models for the project seen in the movie,” Maximilian says, noting how much he’s drawn to creatives with “many different careers and many different lives.”
Now that they’ve settled in, Maximilian and Irina plan to stay as long as the apartment’s owner will let them—though that doesn’t mean the space will remain static. The home’s evolution is part of the ongoing process of living with your work and working where you live. “The apartment never looks the same,” Maximilian says. “Every two or three weeks the space has a different change to it.”
Julia Cancilla is the social media & news editor at ELLE Decor, where she oversees the brand’s socials and covers design, pop culture, and emerging trends. She also authors the monthly ELLE Decoroscope column. Her work has appeared in Inked magazine, House Beautiful, Marie Claire, and more.