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"I'm wearing purple for the first time in 10 years. Can you believe it?" Karim Rashid's skintight Japanese Levi's are indeed a color too vivid for the average American man to even consider. Purple does not seem at all far-fetched, however, on this svelte designer as he gives a tour of the New York loft he shares with his Serbian wife, chemical engi neer Ivana Rashid.

Most of the walls are as white as the impeccable suits he's better known for wearing, but the wall-to-wall carpet in the bedroom is fuchsia. In his opinion, all colors go together: "I don't think there are rules anymore." Aside from the bedroom carpet, flooring is sheet vinyl in his signature shade of baby pink. "That's the only controversial color we still have," he says, touting its positive energy and power as a youth magnet. "If I'm wearing pink in an airport, you should see how many children come up and talk to me."

Rashid spends plenty of time in airports as he shuttles between projects in 39 countries, but New York is still the place he calls home. After meeting his wife at a speaking engagement in Belgrade, he begged her for a first date that ultimately took place in Seoul, South Korea. The couple moved to this loft in deference to her. "We decided to find a new space to start our life together," he says. His previous apart ment, right upstairs from the studio where his namesake firm designs products and interiors, "wasn't very private," he admits, what with clients always popping in. The new place benefits from being a short walk-and a world-away.

The couple must have looked at 50 options before discovering this 1,600-square-foot apartment in a brick industrial building with 10 ½-foot ceilings, higher than most. Essentially no square footage is lost to corridors, and lots of windows face south and west. Interior architecture was largely in place, from the new kitchen to the gallery-style baseboard reveals. The only change to the windows was cosmetic: the installation of simple solar shades. "In the past eight years, I've done over 50 interiors, and I've noticed that I'm getting more and more rigorous," he says. He also reconfigured the master bedroom's walk-in closet and jazzed up the en suite bathroom with his own biomorphic pink sinks and psychedelic glazed ceramic tiles.

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