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CLASSNOTES | Profile
Max Sinsteden
THE WELLDESIGNED LIFE
’05
It is a sweltering July afternoon in New York’s
bustling Garment District, but interior designer Max Sinsteden ’05 knows just the place to
escape the heat and chaos. We retreat to the NoMad Hotel, just blocks from the headquarters of Olasky & Sinsteden, the interior design firm Max co-founded in 2009. Dim and cool, the interior library room is busy with in-the-know travelers. The atmosphere is sophisticated without being staid, much like Max himself who, though just 27, has the kind of career professionals much his senior would envy. In less than five years Max and his partner, fellow designer Catherine Olasky, have developed a global reputation. Their completed projects include homes in Dublin, London, and India; their work was featured in Sotheby’s inaugural Designer Showhouse in 2014. It seems a meteorological rise, yet Max credits his mentors for his success. “The only way to learn is to work for other people,” he says.
Max began his education at the famed David Easton Interiors and continued on to work with celebrated designer Charlotte Moss. It was while working for Moss in 2009 that Max’s Drew University dorm room was featured in New York magazine’s Home Design issue. The room’s layered oriental rugs and artfully curated mix of thrift-store finds, client gifts, and family pieces offered an early glimpse of Max’s precocious style and distinguished him as a talent to watch. Max is hardly less baby-faced now then he was when photographed as a college senior, but his work has matured. “I’ve been in this business now for 12 years, which is hard for me to believe,” he says. Max came to Choate as a fourth former. Raised in Hartford, Conn., Max was, in his own words, “a very eccentric, artistic kid.” He channeled those energies first at a family friend’s architecture firm and then in the kitchen. “The summer I was 14 my best friend and I started a catering company and catered 16 parties in a month and a half,” he says. Neither field was the right fit, but when he began at David Easton something clicked immediately. Though he was younger than his fellow interns by almost a decade, Max was invited to return the next summer. He would continue on for the next four years before leaving to work for Charlotte Moss. While still at Choate his personal space became a place of play and experimentation. “I lived in a tiny attic room in Woodhouse and I wallpapered all the walls with nautical charts,” he remembers. Before he had clients of his own, he began consulting for friends and family, something he continues to do even now. While he finds inspiration everywhere, travel is a primary creative source. “I think that’s even where I got this bug, that I traveled so much as a kid with my family,” Max says. It is an interest he shares with partner, Catherine Olasky, whom he first met in London in 2009. Max was interning for the Victoria and Albert Museum, the world’s largest museum of decorative arts and design, and Catherine was working for Colefax & Fowler, the storied English design house. They made an immediate connection and made their partnership official that fall. Since beginning Olasky & Sinsteden, personal travel has become something of a forbidden luxury, though summer allows Max to steal time away. When we met, he had just returned from Capri, and was looking forward to a trip to Kenya. More typically, Max and Catherine are jetting off to oversee a project, like the decoration of a 16th century Guernsey farmhouse they installed in 2013. Max sees the artisans he relies upon as collaborators. “That’s my favorite part of the business, hands down,” he says. “You wouldn’t even know that there are people who do the things that they do. It’s so important to me that these businesses stay alive.” New York hardware company P.E. Guerin is a particular favorite. “Each piece is literally like jewelry. Every single thing they make the hand of the artist – or five artists – is there.” It is Max’s unbridled energy together with his respect for tradition that creates his homes’ signature vibrancy and dynamism. And his work is always growing, always changing. Max recently moved to a new apartment. “I now think I know what I want it to look like in four months,” he says. “I have a vision.” s t o r y b y L i n d s ay W h a L e n ’ 0 1 Lindsay Whalen is a Truman Capote Fellow in the Brooklyn College MFA Program.