Consummate Collector Pads His Soho Loft With Provocative Art

Welcome to House Calls, a new feature in which Curbed tours New Yorkers' lovely, offbeat, or otherwise awesome homes. Think your space should be featured next? Drop us a line.

Xavier Guery was born in France, attended university in Paris, and has lived and worked in London, Frankfurt, and, for the past ten years, New York City. To put it simply, Xavier is an international man with tastes that reflect an eclectic life. Nestled throughout his sprawling two-bedroom home in an old Soho cast-iron building on Howard Street are artifacts of his travels and evidence of his penchant for modern art. The walls are dotted with acquisitions from abroad as well as pieces created by friends in New York City, all complimented by striking contemporary furnishings.

Guery's love for the contemporary and modern is learned; he grew up in a home with similar furnishings and even owns two pieces by an artist whose work appeared in a childhood seaside vacation home in France. Growing up, Guery said he didn't quite "get" contemporary art. It wasn't until his parents took him to an exhibition in Paris in his teen years that the he connected with the aesthetic that now dominates his home.

Despite the appearance of its angles and lines, Guery's home is warm. A fan of dinner parties—a European sensibility, he asserts—Guery loves to pour wine and converse around his new dining table. More than once his art has been a topic of conversation. That's unsurprising when guests are greeted by "Love Sack" a sculpture cast out of a real Hermes Birkin bag and filled with glass sex toys. The sculpture lights up from the bottom. "It's funny," Xavier said nonchalantly of a conversation at a recent dinner party, "how different people have different interpretations of this sculpture. We talked about it for way too long."

· House Calls archives [Curbed]