Solange Knowles has lived in the same downtown Hollywood-view loft since she was just 19, adding a few personal touches, including furniture she designed herself.
The singer-songwriter, who has a net worth of $9 million, recently shared in an Architectural Digest how she made the space her own personal sanctuary with objects she collects that she feels encapsulate her life.
She even shared how she writes most of her music from the bathtub, which became a safe haven for her early in her career.
Solange’s downtown flat is now an eclectic minimalist space, with commissioned works by black artists and an assortment of knick-knacks that bring you peace.
As Chloe Sultan wrote for Apartment magazine, “This loft has been through it all, the private island where your personal investigations of space register in the small, mundane arrangements of your everyday life.”
Solange Knowles, 36, recently showed off her intimate loft overlooking downtown Hollywood.
She designed the sofa in the living room herself, just steps from the kitchen appliances.
Solange, now 36, first moved into the apartment when she was just 19 with a young son.
“As my songwriting career grew, I wanted to find a place where we could have a little more grounding, a home life with more stable roots,” she said of her apartment search at the time.
“I was a single mom looking for a building with a sense of security when I found this loft in Hollywood,” she told real estate magazine, describing it as a “peaceful nest” from the bustling outer city.
‘I really felt connected to his [1920s] art deco architecture, its exterior and all of its original trim and details,’ Solange said.
She has since said, “No matter where I’ve gone or moved to, no matter what friends or relationships have entered or left my life, this loft has always been a place of home.”
It has been one of the most constant and fundamental things in my life.
Solange then shared how the bathtub in the loft became her own personal oasis, where she does most of her writing.
“The beginnings of that love of the bathroom really started in the loft,” he said. ‘Those days when I would come home alone from the studio, my son was at school, and that was my safe space.
“I recognize it as a kind of recreation of the environment of a womb, feeling safe in that, trying to recreate those first links with my mother.
“The bathtub was my space to take care of myself, my body and my heart, and have those awakenings of what I was called to do and deliver to the world.”
Solange’s minimalist bathroom is shown here, where she says she writes most of her
At first, Solange said, she didn’t have much in the apartment except a mattress, a bed in her son’s room and “the most basic furniture she could have.”
At first, Solange said, she didn’t have much in the apartment except a mattress, a bed in her son’s room and “the most basic furniture she could have.”
But eventually, he said, he began to add his own personal touches to the space.
‘And then I remember I lived in New York for a period and my mom moved there while they were renovating her house.
“She totally did it Tina and painted all the walls and put up curtains and added a bedroom,” Beyoncé’s sister recounted. ‘In the six months that she was in it, she transformed it.’
At some point, Solange even started designing her own furniture while trying to find “new ways to express my own design language and encompass all my ideas and ideals in objects.”
He started by creating his own sofa, which he said he wanted to be a “modular piece with different variations, but all starting with the circle, which is very sacred to me.”
Originally, he said, he had the sofa facing the window “so that most of my guests and I would face the light.”
‘Then I had him in a circle, which was a really intense social experiment, witnessing people have such intentionality with their energy and their body language, just absolutely mirroring the person across the room.
“And then I opened it up in this current configuration, and it felt really good,” Solange said of the wavy pattern it has now.
“It’s not as intense as the circle, but you still have that kind of energy flow from your neighbor.”
The singer-songwriter said she began to fill her apartment with ‘lifetime objects’
Solange has also he began ‘collecting things with the intention of keeping them as lifelong objects that would become a part of my life wherever I am, imagining how these objects and works of art might evolve with me in the next 40 or 50 years’.
She explained that she relies on these objects “to teach me things about myself and to reflect things back to me that I need to hear or work on.”
“I really look at all of this as things that I would leave on my own personal altars, or if I were to leave, which I would like to be a representation of who I was and what I believed in.”
She added: ‘In recent years, it’s the space I get to that feels like a snapshot of these different chapters of my life.
“It’s very sentimental to me, for sure.”