1st Dibs | Unionworks
Step Inside a 1960s Beverly Hills Home Deftly Updated by Brooklyn’s Unionworks
To look at Poonam Khanna’s elegant, understated rooms — with their confident, skillful blend of spare, modern lines and warm, welcoming tones and textures — you’d never know that her path to interior design was a circuitous one.
After studying political science and international relations at Brown and beginning a management training program at Saks Fifth Avenue (a mistake, she realized), Khanna earned a master’s degree in architecture from Parsons and another from Columbia University. She then spent several years at the New York City Housing Authority, where she designed a community center, before leaving to work with a friend in Telluride, Colorado, on interiors for wealthy clients.
This new focus on interior design was an unplanned career shift — “It just dropped in my lap,” she says — but it clearly suited her well.
Since founding her Brooklyn-based studio, Unionworks — a name that conveys the importance of collaboration between designers, architects and clients — in 2007, Khanna has designed projects ranging from elegant residential interiors on both the East and West Coasts to fashion showrooms. Her retail store for the label Loeffler Randall (which she describes as “more like a space to feel pretty in and less like a store”) will open in Soho early next year. And she’s at work now on a venture-capital office in a Greenwich Village brownstone, where the client asked for spaces “that evoke a sense of joy” and which features a mix of MODERNIST, vintage and contemporary pieces.
Khanna’s change of career from the sometimes overly analytical field of architecture is not surprising, given her philosophy that “more than anything else, design is emotional and deeply personal.” It is this philosophy that informs her modern but sensuous aesthetic.
