Photos and text by Susan Schiffman
Tenant: Tanya, since 1985
In 1978, Tanya came to NYC from Ann Arbor, Mich., to attend NYU. She lived in the dorms Weinstein and then Brittany. There were only three dorms back then.
After graduation in 1982, Tanya looked for an apartment in the East Village. Tanya and I reminisced about how you could walk around the neighborhood and ask supers if there were any apartments available in their building. This is how she found her apartment on 13th Street.
She met a pop star and moved to London to be with him, giving up her apartment in the process. They came back to New York, where she moved in and out of 10 different places. She found her current apartment through friends in 1985.
Tanya loves that all of the moldings in her apartment are original. She also loves that each room by law had to have a door and a window to be classified as a room.
She and her apartment are very inspired by Heywood-Wakefield Modern Furniture. She is obsessed with Hawaiian textiles. She has recovered her couch about five times. Tanya has made all of the pillows, curtains, duvet covers and reupholstery in her home. She repainted the floor eight times with a tiny brush.
If you're interested in inviting Susan in to photograph your apartment for an upcoming post, then you may contact her via this email.
15 comments:
dream apartment
Love the kitchen. And dice numbered clock. (And the moldings.)
amazing floor
her place is stunning! thanks so much for posting!
Great apt.
Nice. Not for me personally, but a definite aesthetic. Some of the other rent-stabilized apts you've shown have looked a bit...hoarder-y.
An observation I've made about this EV feature:
Most if not all the tenants are artists, creative, and more often than not in the hedge fund manager/banker/stockbroker/finance field.
Imagine an entire neighborhood/city like this.
Imagine a regular feature about a bro's apartment LOL.
Fantastic design ideas, not that I would actually have them, but they are great -
happy and uplifting.
A terrific apartment !
Makes me wonder if I should be more interesting.
Tanya, I would like to contact you somehow - do you hire out to reupholster and do other fabric-y projects? I'm on 11th and B, can't sew anything except a button, and am quite serious about retaining your services if you're available!
Thank you for your comments and thank you to evgrieve for posting my project. I wanted to share another dimension to this project which is the inspiration from a book that is very important to me by Gaston Bachelard called "The Poetics of Space". In this book house is explored as a metaphor for mind. The table of contents is literally each space in a house from basement to attic including closets and drawers. How do we live in our homes? How do we store all that we have lived into an apartment that does not have a basement, attic or closets?
I went to NYU around the same time, I lived at Judson Hall. Students were always going over to the Limelight and they would tell stories about how Billy Idol was there, and that one and this one. Ha ha. It was so fun. The apartment has so much character, just beautiful. Dat East Village style is something I really miss.
Great apartment! A clear decorating point of view & carried out beautifully!
PS: Just want to mention that even today, whether free market or stabilized, a "room" is legally required to have a window (not sure about a door). I've seen some apartment listings lately (both for rent and condos for sale) where that requirement is being skirted.
This place looks amazing!
A Bedroom has to legally have a window, not a living room
@2:16pm: You are wrong. EVERY habitable room must have a window; see below citation re: living rooms.
"What is a “living room”?
(Source: NYC Administrative Code § 27-2074, -2058; MDL §§ 1-4, 3-31)
• Definition: A living room is any room other than a dining space, kitchenette, bathroom, foyer, or hallway. A living room can be a bedroom, if it meets the criteria set forth above.
• Lighting requirements: A living room must have at least one window that opens onto a street, yard, or court on the same lot.
All windows in living rooms must comply with the size requirements for windows in bedrooms: The total area must be at least one-tenth of the floor area of the room. All required windows must be at least twelve square feet.
• Usage requirements: If a living room is subdivided, each subdivision must comply with all of the above requirements."
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