The June issue of Wallpaper features the Thomas Street loft of industrial engineer Jane Boon and Time Inc. executive Norman Pearlstine. (Full disclosure: I edited a few pieces by Pearlstine for Fortune magazine back around 2002.) It’s the top three floors of that cute building next to the McDonald’s, which the magazine describes as “a five-floor Ruskinian Gothic building dating from 1875 and designed by J Morgan Slade for soap manufacturer David S Brown [with] a cast iron storefront and a robust red brick facade that features polished granite ionic columns, pointed and round arches, a Venetian-style arcade and a round attic window.”

Boon and Pearlstine hired David Mann of MR Architecture + Décor to redo the place. “I told a couple of other designers we interviewed that I had this fantasy of living in a cave and they sort of looked at me in horror,” recalled Boon. But Mann was into it, using dark colors on the walls, floors, and ceilings. There had been three bedrooms, but now there’s a master suite, an office (“a cave within a cave,” says Pearlstine), and a shared dressing room.

Of note:

••• Boon, who sounds like a hoot, calls the kitchen “a high-class morgue” and the Espasso dining table a “medical lab.” She jokes that they’re “living in Barbie’s dream house, except that Barbie is a mad scientist with a fetish for metal and black.”

••• They went on a spree at Patrick Parrish on Lispenard, picking up a Frank Gehry chair; a RO/LU masonite table and bench; a Doug Johnston cord sculpture; and a Jonathan Nesci steel chair.

••• They raided the Time-Life photo archives, printing images on aluminum.

The full text by Pei-Ru Keh is here, along with a slideshow of François Dischinger‘s full-size photographs.

Recent Loft Peeping posts:
• Gwyneth Paltrow
• Gerken Building Penthouse
• Mark Berryman
• Naomi Watts & Liev Schreiber
• Elizabeth & Albert Watson
• Allison O’Neill & Family
• American Thread Building Penthouse
• Two-Bedroom Rental
• 14,000-Square-Foot Triplex Penthouse
• PJ Mattan & Jett House