A Paris-Inspired Apartment...with Picasso Paintings...in New York City

Hi welcome to my upper west side apartment come on in i am mary ann sides and i am a content creator in new york and i run the blog the mma times we just actually moved to new york about four months ago so we're totally new york newbies still but it was always a pipe dream of ours to live here so we finally took the plunge during the pandemic of course which is not an ideal time to move but like we kind of lucked out with the apartment we actually rented this apartment site on scene we had friends come see it for us and we were like you know what we have this feeling that's the one so we signed the lease without ever seeing it and we are in our foyer which i cannot believe our first new york apartment has a four year but we are here i am so thankful that we have this space we actually so we painted the whole space when we moved in we also painted these archways i was really inspired by how a lot of the brooklyn brownstones actually have painted black archways in their entrances so that's sort of what inspired us to do it here and recreate it um this piece of furniture was something that when i realized we had a wall space for it we were so excited to bring it this was actually ryan's grandmother's um we painted it black and refinished it and then also updated it with some hardware and it's a storage piece but also something sentimental that we were able to bring with us so this one has a few different pieces some of them we found from shops online some we shot found in vintage shops here the one in the brown frame up there i actually found from a local used bookstore it's called west cider books if you're in manhattan or in new york check it out because they have some amazing vintage books but pretty much how i go about doing any of my gallery walls is i like to mix about two or three colors or like types of frames so here i have the black the browns and golds and then i will just lay them out on the floor i usually space them about an inch or two inches apart and then i'll use they make these command strips that have velcro on them you just stick them to the frame stick them up on the wall use a level and you're good to go i don't actually pre-measure anything before i put it up i just start going and see where it takes me and i kind of love the collected look that it ends up having so that means you don't use any nails no nails nope it's all just like you can rip it off if you wanted to and it's just velcro onto the wall and then you just peel it off when you move out and hopefully don't have to repair anything let's go into the living space so this is our living room dining room cafe bar office area a little bit of everything it's a really big room for a living space in new york so we lucked out there i think the first thing that you see the elephant in the room is it's a beautiful fireplace two days into us moving here we have found this gem on facebook marketplace believe it or not um there was a girl who was selling it in washington square park it was snowing that day but we just went and grabbed it i think she was selling it for like 200 this is my tv actually believe it or not so this is a samsung frame um it displays artwork on it and the reason it's on an easel is because we tried to mount it above the fireplace when we moved in and hope my landlord doesn't see this but we put a hole in the wall trying to mount it so lesson learned you do not drill into pre-war walls did you put up all this molding we did so we knew we wanted to have that here so we found a renter friendly way to do it it's actually made out of polyurethane so it's super lightweight we did the same thing here where we put um the double stick mounting tape behind it and pressed it up painted it all the walls are swiss coffee it's a pre-war building it was built in i think 1925 so we wanted to incorporate a lot of kind of art deco influences like from that era and i have somewhat of a modern style but i really like to incorporate vintage elements and like a collection of things that are meaning to us as opposed to just filling it with stuff i think that was something that we learned when we moved to new york is that space is limited and everything that you have in your apartment needs to be either intentional or practical even if it's pretty so this is looks like a sconce right it's actually not hardwired these are hardwire lights um and you can just put little puck lights up in there that are controlled on a remote and you can fake it so what would usually cost several hundred dollars to get it installed and have something that you have to majorly repair when you move out we actually did this for very inexpensively and it looks perfect these were a find on craigslist actually so i think they're from the 60s or 70s and we snagged and we actually painted a black they were wood before so this is something i don't know if i'm more proud of this sort of our fireplace but this is a cabinet when we moved here i needed somewhere to swirl my glassware our cabinet space got small really quickly um so we wanted some sort of curio cabinet and this actually was another secondhand find believe it or not this was like 300 i think it was kind of a golden brown when we got it and then we painted it black and i think it's perfect so this is the other side of our living space it is if you don't live in new york you might not know having a dining room feels like a luxury in the city um but we actually didn't have it at first when we moved in um we had the living room about six different ways i think before we kind of found what flow worked best and what maximized the space and once we set it up this way we realized we actually have room to put a dining room in this corner with a little bar cart over there and then also make room for an office along this wall this is my husband ryan and this is one of our cats this is neville he's our shy yeah this is the one that you'll never see so this is actually a treat for you and for everybody it's his first camera debut probably yeah that's the first time he's been seen in public so ryan you're the artiste here tell me about this gallery wall yeah so everything on this gallery wall kind of has a story or means something to us um it has some relevance it wasn't just a bunch of things that we thought were pretty well these three are original picassos but uh specifically these two are my favorites so how do you go about getting picassos yeah so i know that when you hear picasso you're like no there's no way you don't have 20 million dollars he did tons of these just little sketches and watercolors in like a little sketchbook and you can find these they're verified by galleries and art museums but you can find them on auctions and through galleries for less than a thousand dollars a piece so now we're kind of leaving our living space our apartment kind of makes a circle so we're going into our kitchen now which for new york standards this is a big kitchen which i was thrilled with because i do actually love to cook for all the great restaurants that are here i actually love being in the kitchen so when we moved in it was it was okay for a newer kitchen but we wanted to really make it our own and renovate it a little bit so we added this believe it or not is peel and stick so this comes on a sheet and it's real marble it's actual tile and was not that expensive so we replaced our backsplash um we replaced the hardware and the faucet as well we actually did that ourselves it's not as hard or as intimidating as you might think it is um and just those things alone really updated the kitchen and made it feel like us so the view you can actually see the hudson river from our window this at night it just twinkles and it's a dream city view i can't believe i get to stand here make my coffee in the morning and look out the window so we actually added this um bar card in and just i actually usually end up cooking and prepping food here and then turning around which are our stove does open there's always a lot of concern and there is room um but then we also added this open shelving that was something else we had in our old home that i really wanted to bring here we just have a lot of things i love displaying but we also made it functional with the food storage jars and there's lots of ways to make it feel very pretty and decorative while still being really functional this is one of my favorite things this is a framed menu from a cafe that was across from our airbnb in paris it was just when we ate out a lot after we got engaged and nothing super fancy but it was just held a lot of memories for us welcome to the bedroom we were lucky enough to be able to bring our king size bed which another little luxury that i'm very thankful to have in our apartment um we've got luna and nibble here these are my little babies this is where they are 90 of the time is in this room well this is the peach room first of all if you didn't notice um and so we really played off of that with these botanical prints these were actually something we had in our attic for a long time they were ryan's he had gotten them um they're from a museum and he'd always wanted them hung up somewhere and i felt like it really just fit this space um perfectly so we sort of played off of this and we put up this beautiful regina andrew chandelier onto the ceiling it's got little floral crystals on it it feels very whimsical to me it's a lot more color than i'm ever used to incorporating into his face but it just feels like this little garden retreat almost and um just sort of magical and playful and a little bit vintage with the chandelier and the prince what do you love most about your home i love it's just so cozy it feels like us i mean in a city so big it just feels so warm and welcoming in here it has so much personality i love that we have the original architecture and the high ceilings to really play off of with design and i have to say i think our location in this view of the water is another thing i sit in bed every night i can see the sunset over the hudson and it's just i sit in that window and i'm like how do i live here it's such a pinch me moment for me every day