Before & After: A Chintzy Manhattan Flat Is Given the Gallery Treatment for an Art Lover

Before Klara Hribkova was a New Yorker renovating an Upper East Side apartment, she was a tourist. For two decades, Klara made a biannual arts pilgrimage to the Manhattan, where she stuffed her itinerary with the the kinds of museum exhibitions, artists talks, and architecture tours that weren’t as readily available where she lived in Minneapolis. However, because her city was relatively affordable, she was able to purchase a loft large enough to hold her generous collection of art and books, many of its pieces sourced in New York. Klara prefers the work of self-taught artists, she says, and her collection includes Murano glass, folk art, and German expressionism, all sourced from galleries or online auction sites like eBay.