Furniture designer Sophie Collé invited us into her Brooklyn loft, a living laboratory where radical play becomes considered furniture. For this edition of Inside Spaces, we lit Bound, let the room warm up, and asked five questions about joyful shapes, studio rituals, and the secrets objects keep.

What’s the most unexpected thing that’s happened in your space?

Maybe not the most scandalous, but for years one room of my loft was a full woodshop, which always shocked people, especially in person! I live in an artist-style loft directly above a metal shop, so it wasn’t totally wild once you saw the context. I’ve outgrown it and now use outside studios, but that era was fun and chaotic. The woodshop was infamous. I still keep a painting/office studio at home.

When you’re alone here, what’s the thing you do that no one else knows about?

I live with my girlfriend, so I fear there's not much I do in secret anymore (even though we do have excellent living space boundaries). I do spend an embarrassing amount of time watching TV - let’s call it research; set design matters to me. I also love people watching from the windows and eavesdropping through these very thin walls.

What object in this room holds a secret about you?

I just brought back my 7th-grade diary from my parents’ house, and it’s mortifying. I can’t believe I didn’t have eyes on it for years and I can only imagine who may have peeked. It’s safely hidden now. It’s sweet to see how little and how much I’ve changed, all at once.

What feeling does this space give you that nowhere else does?

Freedom. My loft is my lab for design experiments. I still get anxious about making it picture-perfect and hunting for the next best piece, but this is where I can play without client constraints (love those too, obviously). I test ideas here and bring the good ones into my formal work.

Describe the Bound by Circus scent.

When I first lit it, it reminded me of the mixtures of smells that would come out of my woodshop - warm and kind of dangerous and even a little sexy! That heated wood note is nostalgic and comforting for a lot of woodworkers, and there’s an edge to it that I love.