They have a long lease on four floors of a loft building in the flower district, which houses her workrooms, and they live upstairs, in a garret penthouse they renovated on the cheap, fifteen years ago. A dining room, furnished with a marble drafting table at which they eat and work, opens onto a listing balcony that overlooks a former lithography studio. They sleep on a mezzanine, under a ceiling splotched by a century of water stains—yellow scabs that sometimes reopen. Ruben covered two of the walls with a graffiti-like frieze of faces. The décor is, as he puts it, “a crazy quilt” of found objects—puppets, a birdcage, hula hoops—some hanging from the rafters. A cactus from Woolworth’s is now, thanks to Isabel’s “insane green thumb,” fifteen feet tall. Friends contributed eccentric furniture, and, surrounded by art books, canvases, and stylized dress forms that Ruben designs for Pucci Mannequins (including the refreshingly well-padded “Birdie”—38-32-44), a woodworm-ridden Buddha sits on an odd-shaped table.
