Michelle Williams stood in the cast-iron, lever-operated elevator in a beautiful sheath dress and long black leather gloves. Pink catering crates were stacked up behind her. “This elevator!” she exclaimed to her friend, the stylist Kate Young. “You don’t see elevators like this anymore.”
It was a blustery spring evening, and guests had arrived for the Judd Foundation’s annual benefit dinner at 101 Spring Street in SoHo. The five-story industrial loft is open only for guided tours made with a reservation, its spare interiors often a source of mystery to the tourists who crowd the neighborhood’s streets.
The property was once the home of Donald Judd, one of the last century’s great minimalist artists, and it has been preserved almost exactly as he left it after he died in 1994. Mr. Judd purchased the building in 1968, slowly renovating it over the years, adhering to his strict principles of design by keeping the space nearly as it was.
The night was a rare chance to step into the artist’s world, part of a continuing effort to preserve his legacy.
The Judd Foundation, a nonprofit organization, is run by Mr. Judd’s two children, Rainer (its president) and Flavin Judd (its artistic director). But maintaining the building — as well as the artist’s 21 other properties in the rural town of Marfa, Texas — is expensive. The evening raised $250,000.
The fashion designer Cate Holstein, of the fashion brand Khaite, was the evening’s partner. Her husband, the architectural designer Griffin Frazen, cited an influential trip to Marfa in 2012, where he saw firsthand the effort that went into preserving Mr. Judd’s work and buildings. Khaite’s flagship SoHo store, just a few blocks away — which Mr. Frazer designed — was inspired by the neighborhood’s history and by the foundation’s in particular.
“I can’t really believe that we’re here,” said Ms. Holstein, whose New York-based brand is a fashion darling among celebrities. But that was precisely the point. The room — filled with artists like Carol Bove and Anna Weyant and top curators including Alexandra Cunningham Cameron — lent a kind of historical patina to the glamorous Khaite dresses worn that evening. Mr. Judd’s home offered a kind cultural legitimacy that the fashion world was often searching for, noted the stylist Vanessa Traina.
“I remember hanging out here in the kitchen,” said the filmmaker Sofia Coppola, who became friends with Rainer Judd when they were teenagers. The two met in Paris. Rainer recalled their nights clubbing at places like Le Bains Douche. “We drank Orangina,” she said. Later, they became pen pals, sending each other faxes.
The evening had a more intimate air than most fund-raisers, partly because many guests were seated around Mr. Judd’s actual kitchen table from 1985, made of pine and joined together at right angles with little embellishment. The iconic but simple design has become something of a status symbol among the elite. Just last year, Kim Kardashian claimed her SKIMS office table was a Judd piece, which the foundation disputed with a lawsuit.
Mr. Judd was known as something of a stickler when it came to his aesthetic preferences. The loft’s floors were assigned different activities (eating, working, sleeping) and sparingly decorated with furniture and sculptures or paintings by the artist and his contemporaries (Dan Flavin, Frank Stella). This month, the ground floor was hung with a series of paintings from the 1950s and ’60s by Mr. Judd.
The foundation offers a legitimate tie to a generation of artists who may command hefty prices in the market now, but who made art largely because, as Mr. Judd — a prolific essayist and critic — put it, it was “something you do if you need to do it and like to do it.”
“I’ll tell you what, if my father left me a building like this, I wouldn’t have restored it,” said the writer Fran Lebowitz. “I’d have sold it! All my father left me when he died was my mother.”
The evening’s Italian dinner was prepared by the chefs Rita Sodi and Jody Williams, who together run several West Village restaurants (including Via Carota and I Sodi). In the kitchen, a basket of bright green peas, still in their shells, was artfully placed on Mr. Judd’s original chopping boards alongside punnets of vivid red strawberries from California.
The duo cooked an elegant meal, starting with salami and fried green olives, followed by roasted carrots, asparagus, porchetta with fennel and a seafood couscous, with stewed spinach and fresh chickpeas. “We must pace ourselves,” cautioned Ms. Coppola to her husband, the musician Thomas Mars.
The filmmakers Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold, whose film “The Brutalist” picked up three Academy Awards in March, were also in attendance. What would their fictional midcentury Hungarian architect, László Tóth, have thought of Donald Judd?
“Oh, I think I need a few more drinks for that!” Mr. Corbet said. The couple, he added, were exhausted from the lengthy awards season.
At the end of the night, guests descended to the ground floor for espresso martinis.
“We grew up in this building with our mother,” said Flavin Judd. “It took us three years to restore it. It better be here for hundreds of years longer.”
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