On the corner of Spring Street, and Mercer Street in Manhattan sits an absolute marvel of New York City architecture. The five-story cast-iron building, built in 1870, was the residence and studio of the monumental American artist Donald Judd. He purchased the former factory in 1968, when artists began flocking to SoHo for the abundant cheap real estate, and lived and worked there until the end of his life in 1994. Today, the Judd Foundation, managed by Donald’s children, Flavin and Rainer, maintains the space just as Donald left it, as a museum and office.

While Judd’s legacy as an artist and designer continues to have major cultural impact — most notably, perhaps, as the mastermind behind the development of Marfa, Texas, where he started the sprawling Chinati Foundation for large-scale artworks and his own architectural fantasies — what’s most interesting about visiting 101 Spring Street is the close encounter one gets to have with his personal things, which still remain in the places he left them. Don’s stuff.

According to his son, Flavin, Judd thought domestic objects were “important because that’s what you look at everyday. You handle them; you’re familiar with your coffee cup. If it’s something you’ve not considered, then you’ve lost an opportunity to pay attention to the world around you.” 

Earlier this year, I visited to see what I could learn about how Judd considered the world.

The first floor is a gallery space with high ceilings, white walls, and scarred wood floors. When Judd bought the building, a former factory, he stripped it to its bare elements. His technique has been taken up by present-day designers, evident in the preference for exposed beams. It might be an exaggeration to credit Judd with inventing the fetish for original hardwood floors, but he was certainly an influence.

Upstairs, the living quarters have a similar white-cube quality, but with signs of habitation: a low daybed, a simple kitchen, and an enormous wooden dining table. Judd left the floor-to-ceiling windows uncovered, preferring unmediated light. The brightness and calm give the room a sacred feel. One becomes acutely aware of the air, the proportions, the sound of one’s own footsteps. 

To Judd, “bad design was like a jackhammer you couldn’t shut off — it had to be isolated,” Flavin says. Standing in the Spring Street kitchen, nothing clamors. Nothing distracts. 

Judd’s bed rests on a low platform surrounded by works from his friends and peers — John Chamberlain, Dan Flavin, and Claes Oldenburg — alongside one of Judd’s own pieces: a wall-mounted square painted in his signature cadmium red, bifurcated by a single asphalt tube. Judd wanted to make art that was straightforward and real — not symbolic, not pretending to be something else. Instead of creating compositions full of hidden meaning, he focused on items that simply exist in space, made from honest materials with clear proportions. This philosophy extends to his home. Judd was not interested in isolated things so much as in a complete system: art, design, and domestic life in deliberate alignment. 

Even mundane objects played a role. Spring Street features Shaker-inspired shelving, Italian splatterware ceramics, and Japanese tableware displayed alongside modernist designs by Alvar Aalto, Gerrit Rietveld, and Thonet. Judd’s own furniture — tables, chairs, daybeds — is severe and unornamented like his art, though he did not consider furniture art. “The art of a chair is not its resemblance to art, but is partly its reasonableness, usefulness, and scale as a chair,” he wrote in his essay “It’s Hard to Find a Good Lamp.” 

Once something met Judd’s standards, it tended to remain, Flavin says. The one camera he ever purchased — a Hasselblad Super Wide, bought on the advice of the artist Larry Bell — was the only one he ever needed. “He thought things should be treated carefully and preserved,” Flavin says. His aesthetic was informed by his visual preference, but it also had an ethical core.

Interestingly, this vigilance did not extend to clothing. Flavin recalls that his father was “pretty indifferent” to what he wore. He bought jeans in Marfa because that was what was available; in Switzerland, he wore hunting clothes. He had green tartan jackets made because he liked the fabric. His exactingness was reserved for spaces and objects. 

It is strange that this sensibility — rooted in thrift from Judd’s Depression-era childhood and the summers he spent on a farm in Missouri — has become one of the most widely imitated and commercially coveted aesthetics of our time. As art critic Jerry Saltz observed in New York Magazine: “Since the 1990s, endless streams of derivative decorators, designers, architects, less-is-more self-help gurus, Calvin Klein stores, landscape artists, furniture-makers, and corporate-office planners have owed many of their ideas to misunderstanding Judd’s notions of objects, space, material, and interior design, the built and lived-in environment.” 

This phenomenon reached its apex when Kim Kardashian commissioned a replica of Judd’s dining table. The ensuing legal spat with his foundation underscored how Judd has transcended from man to symbol. To say his name is to signal that one is “cultured” or “tasteful.” But in Judd’s universe, name-dropping holds no sway.

Flavin describes Judd’s New York home as “more still than when I lived there, but not much has changed.” (They did repair the heat, he noted, “which is a big improvement.”) It is emptier than it once was, especially toward the 1990s as Judd’s life shifted increasingly to Texas and Switzerland. Yet the integrity of Judd’s project remains.

Before his death, Judd established his foundation to preserve his work and the spaces that housed it. 101 Spring Street stands as a corrective to the decadence and theatrics of the art world — a place where the ideas and creations of one of the most important artists of the 20th century can be encountered as intended. To walk through the space is to be reminded that Judd was after something more demanding than a style. He sought a different relationship to the world of objects, and through them, to attention itself.

Anyone can book an appointment, climb the stairs, and step into that precise, sunlit space. Photographs aren’t allowed, and there are no gimmicks — just furniture built to last decades, transformative artworks, objects chosen with care, and floors softened by years of living. Judd’s legacy lands differently in person, not just an aesthetic to imitate, but as a reproach: rigorous, and still fully alive.