Ivana, co-founder of Rhythm Zero, is the creative mind behind the brand. Every material choice, every spatial decision, every object that finds its way onto a shelf or a wall moves through her eye first. The result is spaces that feel less like coffee shops and more like a point of view. Issue 18 is hers.
Three years ago, Ivana walked into an antique garage in Hudson, New York and found a painting she couldn't leave behind. So she did what any person does when they find something they're not ready to lose. She kept checking on it. Every trip to Hudson, she and Alex made sure it was still there. They tracked down the owner, a man named James, and when he finally answered, they spent the better part of a year in conversation before the deal was done. When they met in his shop, James told her the full story. The painting dates to the late 16th or early 17th century and originated in Venice, where it once hung as part of a larger wallpaper composition in a summer house. There were four of them originally. Two went to a friend of James's. He acquired this one about a decade ago. Now it lives on the large wall of Rhythm Zero Greenpoint. The night before it arrived, James restored it himself, stretching the canvas and rebuilding missing parts of the frame. Somehow it looks like it was painted yesterday.
This fall, Rhythm Zero arrives to the Upper East Side, and Ivana is treating it like the most ambitious brief she has ever given herself. The neighborhood demands it. Surrounded by some of New York's most iconic architecture, world class cultural institutions, and landmarks that have shaped the city's identity for over a century, she is approaching the space almost as a small gallery or museum, something that respects where it sits while remaining unmistakably itself.
