棲居美學8 走進哈蒂·科爾普位於曼哈頓的改造後的童年故居

Hi, Apartment Therapy. My name is Hattie. Welcome to my one-bedroom apartment. It was also my childhood home on the Upper West Side. This is the home I grew up in. So I've been living here for a very long time. My parents retired and moved out of the city seven years ago, which was something that they always wanted to do. And I'm very lucky that I was able to stay in the apartment and make it my own. So I've made it my mission to restore it to its original glory. So we're standing in my foyer, or entryway. And I wanted this space to make a statement when you walk in. So this is one of the boldest paint colors that I have in my apartment. It's this really pretty kind of mid-chalky blue. And I've accented that with all white trim work everywhere, which you'll see through the rest of the apartment. And definitely a lot of brass and gold accents. Like this big mirror that I have here. And the thing I really like about the mirror is as soon as you walk in, it reflects down my very long hallway. And you can also obviously check yourself before you leave. And then over here, I have this gallery wall. My mom, in her first career, she was an art historian. So I was raised around a lot of art. And a lot of antiques. And I think that's really what has given me my appreciation for them. Right here, there's absolutely no excuse for not hanging up your coat when you have a coat rack right next to the door. This dresser was a labor of love. I found it secondhand. I actually got it on Etsy. And I had it shipped from Pennsylvania. It was painted a very bright, bright, bright blue color. And this was back when I was first starting on my DIY project. So I naively thought that I could quickly and easily strip all the paint away and get it down to its natural wood. Four weeks later, I finally did. This was my first furniture refinishing. It was very worth it, but it really was a lot harder than I thought. But the great thing about having this dresser in the entryway is it holds so much stuff. So we keep, like, hats and gloves, cold-weather things. And then down here are our everyday shoes, which I know it's kind of weird to keep shoes in a drawer, but it works for us. So this armoire is new-ish to me, at least. I got it about a year ago when I was visiting my parents where they live now in Virginia. There are amazing antique stores where they live. It only had the top shelf here, and then we added the other shelves so that we would have room for everything. And so this has been such a lifesaver. I honestly know how I didn't survive without a linen closet before. But it's a really great piece. I'm so glad I have it. I really love the hallway. It's really long. I think it's, like, 35 feet long. And it starts in the entryway, leads all the way back to the pantry and kitchen. And then off of its right side are the bedroom, living room and dining room. I've treated the hallway just as, like, one giant gallery wall. It has the beautiful original molding. Each of them has a slightly different theme. I have one with some sketches. It's just been very fun to play around with. And then up on the walls, I have these vintage candelabras that I use flameless candles inside. And it looks very kind of castle-y vibes in here when I do that. Welcome to the back part of my apartment. This is the kitchen and butler's pantry here, which then leads into the bathroom, which we'll get into later. This part of the apartment is, I guess, has seen the most change in the past year. My boyfriend and I got renovated it for 4 months from last July through November. It was the longest 4 months of my life. But it was insanely worth it because now we have a brand new kitchen. So everything that you see here in the kitchen is brand new aside from some of the vintage finds that I have up on the shelf. If you rolled a marble from one corner, it would roll all the way to this corner. So the biggest priority was getting that floor leveled, which involved going into the subfloor and fixing all of that. So these tiles are brand new. We went for just a classic marble checkerboard, and I did a gray and white versus a black and white just to give it a little bit of a softer feel, less contrast, which I'm very happy I did. All of the cabinetry came from Deval Kitchens based out of England. They're all handmade, and they were just the perfect thing to put in the kitchen. I'm so happy I went with them. I chose this very muted green from Farrow & Ball for the cabinetry, and I love the way that it pairs with all of the brass accents that we have going on in the kitchen. So coming over here under the window, we have this little bench. We call it V's Bench because my cat Beatrice likes to eat all her meals right up here. I chose to get the same countertop material also on the counter for the bench, and then we just did this beadboard treatment on the front, and it's just been the best addition. Now when I come home and I'm unloading groceries, I can just put them right on the bench, and it's been so great. I get asked about these spice shelves all the time, and we actually made them. I had the idea to use gallery rail. I just thought it would be really pretty. And then Sebastian,my boyfriend, is a very talented carpenter, so he routed these really pretty edges on them, and then I painted them the same color as the cabinetry. We mounted them inside the fridge panel just with some screws, and it worked out really well. This is kind of the joy of getting to build your kitchen from scratch is you get to customize every little thing. So before I had like I think a 36-inch range, and now this one is 24, and then same thing with the fridge over here. I had my previous fridge was probably this wide, also came out further, and this one is also I think 24 inches wide, but very tall. So we're just taking advantage of the vertical space here. So once we started living in the kitchen, I kind of started understanding how I needed it to function, and one thing that really helped was getting these just pull-out organizers for pots and pans. I just found these on Amazon. I have this one down here for my lids. Before I just had all my lids like thrown in a drawer, and this has been very nice, especially if you didn't opt for pull-out drawers in a kitchen, these are the best of both worlds. So clearly I am a fan of open shelving in a kitchen. I know that it can be quite controversial. I think that it's only an issue if you have stuff sitting on the shelf that's just collecting dust, but if you're using dishes every single day, then washing them,I don't think it matters. I just love to display pretty things, so I'm not super worried about dust. I think that with both the kitchen and the butler's pantry together, I have more than enough storage. Now we're standing in my butler's pantry, which I think is the coolest part of my apartment, because it's not every day you see a butler's pantry in an apartment, especially in New York City. So I'm so thankful to have this space intact. Some of my neighbors still have this area in their apartments, but it's just been totally gutted. It's like a big blank white space, which is very sad. So that makes me extra grateful that I still have mine. So when we were doing the kitchen, this space definitely saw some changes. We laid out the same floor in the kitchen and the butler's pantry. I really like to use design elements to tie my spaces together, but it's really important to me that they still feel separate and just honor the apartment's original footprint. While I was renovating the kitchen, I had a lot of people ask me, why don't you just knock down this wall in between the kitchen and the pantry to just make one big kitchen? And to that I answer, because then I wouldn't have a butler's pantry anymore. And it's super important to me to just honor the historical integrity of the apartment by keeping it in its intended condition. We added this counter again to just tie in some of the elements from the kitchen. We did some wallpaper back here in this little area, which I used as a little coffee bar. This is the dumbwaiter. It's no longer in service, but it was back in the day when this building was built, which some records say 1890s, and then others say 1920s. So I'm not 100% sure, but somewhere around there. And I believe the dumbwaiter would be used to maybe bring up deliveries, maybe bring trash down to the basement. I'm not entirely sure. But it was bolted shut a couple decades ago. So it's no longer in use, but I'm so glad we have it, because again, it's just such a cool reminder of the past. One of our more recent projects was doing something with this wall. I always just had art up here, but I really felt like there was a way to maximize the storage potential of the space and once again use that vertical storage space. So we have pantry items like our chia seeds and pasta and rice and just pantry food items up here, our coffee. And then down below, we added this really pretty brass rail system, which is also from Duval Kitchen. And it comes with these hooks. And so I keep grocery bags, strainers, colander. These are mostly for decoration, but pretty. And then I have this hanging basket with little dish towels that I mainly use to clean up the coffee bar after we use it and wipe down the counters. I think it made the pantry feel more like a pantry and less like a hallway. When I was a kid here, instead of there being a lovely window, there was just like a piece of cork board, a bulletin board that someone had put up. The transom had also been taken down and there was just a piece of plywood. When we took this wall down, I was just like this has so much potential to be so beautiful. I sourced this Florentine glass and the reason I went with Florentine was to tie in with my other transoms. And then Sebastian made this custom frame for it. He routed it and it looked amazing. And then this window, I just had a plain piece of glass custom cut because I thought of doing stained glass, but stained glass can be very expensive if custom fit. And I also just wasn't 100% sure on what style I would want to go for. So I just did plain glass and then I found this. It's actually just like a cling, a peel and stick thing from Amazon. But it's textured, which gives it a very realistic look. So we put a piece of the cling on either side of the door. And the coolest thing about this door and why it was so important to me to restore it is because it's a swinging door that leads into the dining room. So let's go into the dining room. The dining room is actually a new addition to the apartment. This room was my parents' bedroom when I was growing up. And then when they moved out, I moved my bedroom into this room just because it's the bigger of the two bedrooms. This originally, when the building was built, would have been a dining room. And so when we were doing the kitchen and that whole reno, we just decided why don't we just make this a dining room? And it's been the best decision. This was a really cool addition to the apartment. So once again, my amazing boyfriend Sebastian, the talented carpenter that he is, built this bookshelf completely from scratch. Back here, behind this little screen is a radiator. It still gives us a lot of heat during the winter time. So recently, I decided to get this chair to put here. And it's just the best little reading nook. And then also being right next to the heater. The cats love to sit here and just nap and spend all day here. I'm trying to get braver with mixing patterns. So I like having, you know, the same color family, but like a nature-y, floral-y one, and then just a simple geometric pattern, like a stripe, I feel like was the most I could do. And I think it's turned out really well. Now, if we come through the dining room, through these pocket doors, we're standing in the living room. And over here in this corner, this corner has some of my favorite pieces. We'll start with this dresser. It was a Facebook marketplace find that I went and picked up in upstate New York. Brought it home. Did a very light refinishing. And I just love the curves on it. I think it's such a nice piece. I got it probably four or five years ago, and it has not moved from this corner. Some furniture pieces, I move around a thousand times, and others, they just stick, because they work so well. And then I have this pretty antique, I believe it's called a bullion lamp. This is a painting that my mom got at auction, probably in the 1980s. And she was nice enough to let me keep him when she moved to Virginia. So over here is the second fireplace in the apartment. And I have this really pretty buttercream tile, original ceramic tile. I spent many, many years fighting this tile. I really didn't like it, because it's yellow. I felt like it wasn't my vibe. So I actually used to cover it with sticky tiles. I did two different ones. And then one day, maybe two years ago, I just had enough, and I decided to finally embrace the yellow. And I'm so glad I did, because I think what makes a home so special, and my home, is its original features. So to cover them is just not doing it any service. And now I have pops of yellow in other places in my living room. It really is the centerpiece of the room. Something I really adore about this apartment is all the symmetry. So there's a fireplace that has windows on either side. And then I have these pocket doors on either side of the living room. Design-wise, it actually makes it very easy for me. So speaking of symmetry, we also have these two sconces on either side. So you'll probably notice in this room, I have the furniture kind of floating in the middle, versus having things up against the wall. I actually used to have them up against the wall when there were walls here. But now I have these pocket doors. Pocket doors are original, but my whole life growing up, they were covered by walls on all four sides. And one of the first projects I did when my parents left was tear those walls down, restore the doors, get them functioning again. And that really was the project that started it all. It really just ignited my love for old homes and totally changed the layout of the apartment. It just made it feel so much more open and so bright. And it's just been the best, most transformative thing that I've done for sure. So over here on this acrylic easel, this is my TV. The reason that it's on an easel is because after we got rid of the walls that were covering the pocket doors, we have very little wall space to work with in here. And the reason I got an acrylic one is because I think I just didn't want to add any additional visual weight to the room. I feel like the living room, aside from changing little bits of decor and painting it, has stayed pretty much the same, except for last year, we did a project where we added this pretty ceiling molding. It has the four corner pieces and then the side pieces that connect it. We actually installed that on our anniversary as a little way to celebrate because we actually met when I hired Sebastian to install crown molding for me. When I hired him, I had been DIYing for quite a few years, but with the irregularity of an old building and the lack of straight walls, I really wasn't feeling too confident in my ability to do crown molding by myself. So I looked into hiring out and a very cute guy showed up at my door and the rest is history. So he installed crown molding in the three main rooms, the bedroom, the living room and then the dining room. And we've been doing projects together ever since. So this table over here, I wasn't totally sure if we were going to keep it after we created the dining room. But for just everyday things, breakfast or if we're watching TV, it's really nice that we kept this dining table here. And this also is the exact same spot where my parents had a dining table when I was growing up. So sitting here just reminds me of having family dinners with my parents as a kid. So I'm really glad that we kept it here. This secretively is where I keep all the ugly electronics and things that I don't like to look at. So my printer, my modem. And this art piece was at least my great-grandparents who also lived in New York way back in the day because I've seen it in my grandparents' wedding photos that they had their wedding reception at her parents' apartment. So it's just a nice family piece to have. If you haven't noticed, I love a mirror. I have several mirrors. I think I have at least two, maybe three in every single room. And it's just such a classic piece. It definitely has that kind of Parisian vibe to it. It just... I think mirrors do a really good job of just opening up the space. So what's very nice about this bedroom is you can probably guess this was my bedroom when I was growing up. It did not used to look like this. I used to have the walls painted a very interesting shade of purple. And I had just a lot of pink and purple going on. Now that it's my grown-up bedroom, I have it painted a really pretty shade of off-white. I like having off-white walls and then very bright white trim because I just think it makes the trim work really stand out and have a nice but subtle contrast. But this is our bed. It's a big king bed. And people always ask me like why does it look so gigantic? I think because it's up very high. I have an 18-inch platform underneath my 12-inch mattress. And I had to get a platform so I could fit stuff under the bed of course because in New York we always need more storage. And then I got this cane headboard which I really think gives a nice contrast to the off-white walls. It's also just very traditional looking and I love the curvature and I love how it kind of fits perfectly in between the original moldings. Similar to what we did in the dining room, we built this custom wardrobe totally from scratch. I say we but it was really mostly Sebastian. I definitely helped. But we just have this one closet in the room which is great but it's a New York closet so it's not that big. So we were really struggling to find ways to store mostly my clothes but also some of his. And we just finished this a couple weeks ago and it has been life-changing, the best thing ever. If you can do it, I highly suggest building custom cabinetry. It is worth every single penny. Coming over here, this is a very special piece to me. This is an antique writing desk. I believe it's 19th century. This is an heirloom from a very dear friend of my family's. She passed away in 2019 and she just she loved me as if I was her own grandchild. So she was a very special person in my life. This is where I get ready in the mornings and do my makeup. I feel like I have a little piece of Elfie here. So having it is just it feels like a warm hug from her. I feel like in New York, it's pretty common to not have your bathroom as your getting ready space. So I also have no outlets in the bathroom, which would definitely make that difficult in terms of like hair drying. So I do that all in the bedroom. Bathroom really is just for bathroom stuff. We switched out the mirror for this medicine cabinet, which definitely helps with storage. And then we have some storage in the sink underneath as well. But last year, we did a little makeover. We painted the walls. I used to have them a really kind of dark gray color. And we did this pretty sky blue. We switched out all the hardware from chrome to brass. I learned the hard way that installing a vintage chandelier is a no-no in bathrooms. But then I found this pretty one that's actually meant for bathrooms. So a lot of the work that I've done to the apartment ever since my parents moved out of the city has just been like restoring the structure and the historical footprint of the home and also finding my own style. So getting to restore this apartment has taught me so much. And I really would not be at all where I am today if it weren't for doing this. It's made me an entire career. It's allowed me to discover something that I'm so passionate about that is interior design and old homes and just really appreciating the character of old homes.