Yeah, I could live there is a semi-new, semi-regular D16 feature wherein I post pictures of homes I want to break into, kick out the inhabitants and move in. Today I’m spying on New York-based photographer Anita Calero’s West Chelsea loft.

I first learned of Calero’s incredible taste in furniture and eye for design when her house in East Hampton was featured in Domino magazine ages ago (check out this kitchen), and since then I’ve been hoarding every photo I can find of her homes. The amount of French Industrial furniture in her loft fills me with pure envy. I’m not sure how one gets their hands on quite so much vintage Jean Prouvé in New York City, but I’m guessing it involves quantities of money that I don’t have.

That Prouvé wardrobe…man. Why can’t I find one of those things on the street someday? (In case you’re curious, I just searched a few auction sites. They sell for like $30–40k. Gulp.) And who designed that lamp? The shape seems a little off to be Serge Mouille. Whatever, though. Everything in this photo is perfect and it makes me want to throw away everything I own and start over.

What, you don’t have a Prouvé desk chair, a couple of JIELDE lamps, a Kaare Klint safari chair and a bunch of turtle shells hanging on your wall? Yeah, me neither, but I wish I did. Well, maybe not the turtle shells. And look at that bookcase! It’s all college dorm-style with the shelves just resting on what look like wooden blocks, but it looks right. I’m crediting the black wall. Black walls fix everything.

I’ll conclude this with a quote from Anita Calero:

People invite me to dinner because they know I will tell them how to reinvent their living space. It is natural for me to move things around so that they fit. I consider everything I own a piece of art including my toothbrush. So when I look at what you have, I see art and I just know where it goes. It is possibly because I am a seriously published photographer and have been a stylist; that I know when something is not right and does not fit. Objects need to dance in a rhythm to their own synchronicity in order for us to feel free. Nature is like that, it knows what goes with what. When things are right—there is happiness, there is peace, there is bliss. That’s what we want to come home to- and what we have to offer.

Nice. “I know when something is not right and does not fit” is really my whole approach to figuring out what to do with my own home. And I should probably get a nicer toothbrush.

Want to see more of Calero’s loft? There are more photos at Loft Life.

✚ Photos by Anita Calero/GMAimages.com and Jonny Valiant