Peek inside home of George Lois, famed art director whose stunning apartment is on the market for $6 million

Some late designers leave behind their original artwork. Some leave magazine covers they’ve designed, pieces acquired from galleries and auctions, and books they’ve written and read. Others, like George Lois, leave all those items and more—inside a stunning apartment easily mistaken for a design museum.

Lois, who was known for his iconic ad campaigns and the Esquire magazine covers he designed between 1962 and 1973, treated his third-floor Greenwich Village residence as a sort of rotating gallery. He and his wife, Rosemary, a painter, spent their weekends at auctions and galleries where they found pieces from all eras and styles to artfully furnish the space with. “Whatever was well designed, beautiful, and functional, they were enamored by,” George’s son, Luke Lois, tells Fast Company. “It was always a changing museum exhibit in this house.”

Now, on the market for $6 million, the sprawling apartment houses around a fifth of Lois’s collection—which, alas, is not for sale with the apartment, realtor Meris Blumstein of the Corcoran Group says. The Loises donated much of the rest to various museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, where several Esquire covers—including one of Andy Warhol drowning in a can of Campbell’s Tomato Soup, and another of Muhammad Ali pierced by arrows—were installed in 2008. Other pieces went to The Brooklyn Museum and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art; George’s archives went to the City College of New York, whose campus included the High School of Music & Art, which George graduated from.

The apartment displays the originals of some of Lois’s most famous ads, including the Tommy Hilfiger poster that launched the designer to household-name status. Others include some of his politically inclined ads, such as one for the 1962 ad campaign for SANE, a committee to ban nuclear testing.

Several of the pieces are more personal, too. Rosemary’s paintings, depicting machinery, dot the walls throughout the 3,000-square-foot full-floor apartment, next to several family photos. A wall hanging of a Venetian blind featuring an American flag on one side and Greek flag on the other (a birthday gift from George’s longtime friend, artist Tony Palladino) hangs over the original bar from Papert Koenig Lois, the first agency George founded.

Other items are centuries old, like the ram’s head that dates back to 5000 BC, and a spear attributed to Alexander the Great’s father.

The apartment’s carefully selected midcentury furnishings are as much a part of the collection as the art itself. There are chairs from midcentury designers Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, a dining set and custom-designed marble art vitrines from Nicos Zographos, and a Danish midcentury-modern sideboard from George Tanier, Blumstein says.

Bookcases line several walls of bedroom and living room walls from floor to ceiling, housing Lois’s collection of books, which numbers around 5,800, according to Luke. The collection includes the nine design books George published himself.

In the six decades they spent in the Butterfield House, the Loises hosted dinner parties attended by the likes of Muhammad Ali, Ed Koch, and Bill Bradley. With so much to look at, guests never wanted to leave, Luke says. “They just had really an extraordinary eye for beauty and art,” Blumstein says.