During the pandemic, Inna Khidekel and Bert van der Walt hatched a plan to move to Florida. They both work in finance — she is senior managing director and global co-head of client solutions at Bridge Investment Group, he the co-founding partner and portfolio manager of Tectonic Investors — and had been renting a loft in Tribeca that would be too small with their second child on the way. But after they found a house in Miami, Khidekel’s company asked that she stay put, so they went looking for a new place in Manhattan.
“This was actually our first purchase in the city,” Khidekel says of the Tribeca duplex they bought in early 2022. It’s in an 1881 cast-iron building that had once been a textile factory and was redone by the Pritzker Prize–winning architect Shigeru Ban in 2019. “We felt that it fulfilled that criteria of what we were looking for,” Khidekel says. “That feeling that we were hoping to get in Florida.”
Once they bought it, there was the question of how to live in it. “Both Bert and I appreciate good design,” Khidekel says, “and we know what we like, but we could not possibly do it ourselves; that was not even in the cards.” A friend suggested they meet with Timothy Godbold, who worked at Ralph Lauren in London and New York before launching his own firm in 2016.