Art Curation for a Seattle Luxury Apartment: Inside the Stellar Collection in South Lake Union

Dark, Dramatic, and Considered: Curating the Art at Stellar Apartments in South Lake Union

Stellar is about depth, drama, and the kind of atmosphere that makes a building feel genuinely singular. Located in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood, Stellar is a Pastakia + Associates development that leans fully into its name. The design features dark palettes, black marble, brass accents, and an interior design language that feels more like a high-end hotel. This is different than a typical apartment complex.

Curating art for a space like this is a particular pleasure. When the architecture already has a strong point of view, the art doesn’t need to soften anything — it just needs to belong.

The Entrance: Three Works, One Statement

The entrance sets the tone for everything that follows. We placed two works here by artists Dawn Bassett and one from Corrie LaVelle. Together they establish the visual language of the entire collection.

Dawn Bassett contributed two works to the entrance — and together they show the remarkable range of her practice. The first is a large circular disc in bone-white tadelakt plaster with a fine fracture line tracing across its surface. This disc floats against the starfield wallpaper of the resident lounge nook. It reads like a full moon suspended in a night sky. In the context of a building called Stellar, the resonance is hard to overstate. The surrounding wallpaper is dense with iridescent light — thousands of tiny specks of blue and aqua against near-black. As a result, the room feels as though it exists somewhere between earth and atmosphere.

Her second piece anchors the reception wall — a dark tadelakt plaster disc mounted against a dramatic geometric tile installation. The tile’s intricate relief pattern of lines, circles, and geometric forms provides a busy, architectural backdrop. Bassett’s piece holds its own against it with a quiet, weighty presence.

Corrie LaVelle’s long vertical work in the corridor beyond is an encaustic wax piece — and in person, the texture is extraordinary. Layers of molten wax in deep black and gold have been built up to create a surface that catches light differently at every angle. It exists somewhere between painting and relief sculpture. It pulls the eye down the hallway with a slow, smoldering intensity that perfectly suits the building’s palette. In addition, it rewards anyone who stops to look closely.

The Bar and Common Space: Light as Art

The upstairs common space is centered on a bar built around a black marble island that is itself a work of art. Its swirling, storm-cloud veining makes the stone the focal point of the room. Against this backdrop, we placed a sculptural wall piece by Nancy Mintz. This piece is unlike anything else in the collection.

Mintz’s sculpture is a constellation of connected nodes and fine lines — hundreds of small points of light wired together into an organic, expanding form. Working in Japanese paper and brass, she constructs pieces that feel simultaneously delicate and architectural. This one is no exception. Against the dark walls of the bar, it glows. It’s the kind of piece that changes as you move around it, as the light shifts, as the room fills and empties.

The Corridors: Standing Still in Deep Time

Everywhere else, the Stellar collection is defined by darkness and drama. The corridors offer something completely different — and the contrast is what makes them work.

Throughout the hallways we curated a series of large-format black and white photographs from Minted: monumental images of ancient standing stones, each one photographed solo against open sky and rolling landscape. The scale is commanding. The stillness is total. Where the rest of the building hums with energy and atmosphere, these corridors ask you to slow down. They ask you to stand in front of something that has been standing for thousands of years.

It’s a curatorial decision that rewards residents who pay attention. The stones are ancient, elemental, and timeless — exactly the counterweight a space this bold needs.

Curating for Atmosphere

Stellar is a reminder that art curation isn’t just about selecting beautiful objects. It’s about reading a space — understanding its mood, its ambitions, its relationship to the people who will live inside it. It is also about building a collection that amplifies all of that. Every piece here was chosen not just to look right, but to feel right. This means in this light, against these walls, for the person arriving home at the end of a long day.

Working again with Pastakia + Associates, a team that consistently creates residential environments with genuine curatorial ambition, made that possible.

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