Acclaimed owner of Chango & Co. interior design firm, Susana Simonpietri, guides Urban Agenda NYC through some of her most striking creations

By Sarah Emily Gilbert

When your past projects include collaborations on residential interiors for Lenny Kravtiz, P.Diddy, and Damon Dash, you know you have made a name for yourself. However, when Susana Simonpietri would sit in the aisle of an England bookstore thumbing through interior design and architecture books (when she should’ve been buying novels for her B.A. in comparative literature), Simonpietri had no idea she would start the esteemed NYC interior design firm, Chango & Co.

A graduate of the Pratt Institute with a Masters degree in Interior Design and Architecture, Simonpietri is not only a dexterous designer, but also a literary maven. Before finding her niche in interior design, Simonpietri received a bachelor’s degree in comparative literature from the University of Puerto Rico, which included studies at La Sorbonne, Paris and the University of Warwick, England. While Simonpietri always felt a push by her parents (a federal judge and an accomplished university professor) to pursue a more academic career, after she decorated her first apartment in Paris, she could no longer ignore her lifelong penchant for design. With a promise to her dad to find an interior design program that offered a Masters Degree, Simonpietri got on the fast track to becoming a renowned designer.

Working three jobs while attending Pratt, two of which involved designing, Simonpietri quickly made a name for herself in the industry. By the time she graduated, Simonpietri was already a Junior Designer at the prized Benjamin Noreiga-Ortiz firm in NYC, which led to a string of jobs with some of the most prestigious interior design firms.

Fast-forward to 2009, and Simonpietri was starting her own firm, Chango & Co. Although she always wanted to establish her own business, Simonpietri didn’t anticipate it becoming a booming success with widespread acclaim. With a small team of skilled designers, contractors, and custom furniture makers, Simonpietri’s firm designs high-end residences, restaurants, and hotels around the United States. Each project is met with personalized care and consideration for the client, in part because Simonpietri is fortunate enough to be able to hand select her clients.

“We’ve gotten to the point where we can pick our clients very carefully. We only take 10% of the work that comes through the door, which is amazing. Through the years, we realized that we wanted to work with people we really liked and who really liked us. I think our aesthetic is very personal and intimate and so our relationship with the client should also be personal and intimate. I think in order to do that - and to do it well - you have to like each other. For us, at the end of the day it’s simply about not being greedy. We could take much more work and make more money, but is it worth it to make more money when you’re not going to be as happy? We pick happiness any day over money.”

Below, the celebrated designer shares the stories behind some of her most stunning creations with Urban Agenda NYC:

Powder Room in Litchfield, Connecticut Countryside Retreat

“This home had a powder room that was stuck in the 1950s. It had horrible Formica siding on the wall, so we took that all down, but kept that charming little sink. It was the tiniest thing you’ve ever seen and fit perfectly into the space. It even had all the original plumbing to it, so we decided to work around it. Basically, we took the space and painted it that very, very dark shade of gray. We make sort of a yearly pilgrimage to High Point, North Carolina to buy things from little antique shops. That year I think we bought like 50 or 60 of those tiny mirrors that you see, so we decided to cover the walls with them. That was a very open-minded client, so we had a lot of jokes going on with the bathroom. I mean, what can make you more uncomfortable when going into the powder room than seeing yourself amplified at so many angles as you take your pants down?”

Kitchen in Riverside Drive Pre-War Residence

“That project was actually done for a family that we work a lot with. It’s a young couple with three little kids and they are amazing. They are these kind of clients that generally have no clue what they want except they know that they like you and pretty much let you do whatever you want. She came to us with no clue what she wanted to do. They had just bought this place and it needed quite a bit of work. But, she had one thing when she first met with us, a ripped out sheet from a magazine that had wild wallpaper on it and she goes, ‘I guess I like this.’ We were like, ‘Okay, let’s build the whole thing from there.’ That wild wallpaper was kind of a nod to that. It’s a really great wallpaper. It’s actually discontinued and we get a lot of questions on it, but it’s from a British Company called Osborne and Little.”

Room in Park Slope Brownstone

“That was a recent project and that was really beautiful. We had to do quite a bit of work. The owners had purchased it from a developer that had taken it to a certain point, but then just basically stopped and sold it. That image has those two very large mirrors flanking. Those were custom made for us. We had the frames made there, and then a company came and brought in the mirrors. We were there for the installment and it was like a heart attack on a plate being there and watching it happen. There were these three guys putting it up on the wall and they looked like the three stooges doing it. We thought it was going to explode into tragedy the whole time, but it worked out and I think it was a really great idea to put up the mirrors. It made the room look very elegant and customized, but it also opened up the space tremendously.”

Children’s Room in Upper West Side Waterfront Apartment

“That was a really cute project. That was a little boy’s room named Owen and he was quite the character and he we tend to interview kids if they’re old enough to be interviewed before we go into their rooms because we want them to really be a part of the process, and this one, he was really cool and he knew the colors that he liked. He said he liked every color in the rainbow, so that’s where the rug came from because it has every color in the rainbow without being too wild. And he wanted a swing, so we made him that bubble chair hanging and we wanted to encourage playfulness so we did bunk beds so that he could have friends over, and then on the stripes on the walls, that’s actually chalk paint, so the room can actually be drawn on so they usually have a great time in that room. Every time we go back to this room the walls are all scribbled on.”

Dining Room in Old Westbury, New York Neoclassical Home

“This is dining room that we painting a deep black color. That table was a custom piece of work. The base is actually made of the legs of the tracks of railroad. It’s made with the wheels to carry specific carts through the Canadian railroads. Everything in that table is kind of reclaimed and then the top is also reclaimed. When they brought the table and we designed it, we knew it was really, really large, and we knew how much it was going to weigh, but I didn’t think how heavy it was going to be to bring it in. It was like 2500 pounds or something, all solid steel at the base. It was pretty impressive.”