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      in Television

      The Other Affair in ‘Conversations With Friends’

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      In the Hulu adaptation of Sally Rooney’s novel, a large and tasteful home becomes an object of infatuation.“I was a big fan of seeing the insides of other people’s houses, especially people who were slightly famous like Melissa,” Frances, the narrator of Sally Rooney’s “Conversations With Friends,” says early on in the novel.Homeownership is a remote concept for Frances, a millennial college student in Dublin who writes and performs spoken word poetry. She’s used to sharing a flat with a roommate and not interested in making a lot of money. But when she finds herself romantically entangled with Melissa and her husband, Nick, their tasteful material life becomes an object of infatuation.In the new Hulu series based on the book, the seaside Victorian belonging to Nick (played by Joe Alwyn) and Melissa (Jemima Kirke) doesn’t disappoint. The interior walls, made of a textured concrete-like material, are a moody gray-blue, and the space is dotted with sprays of eucalyptus, Irish-made ceramics, sheepskin throws and large, artistic light fixtures.The dining nook seems pulled from the pages of a recent Architectural Digest: a plant-filled space with weathered white brick walls and several doors made of large glass panes set in rectangular steel frames, leading to a courtyard.“Your house is very cool,” Frances (Alison Oliver) says over dinner. Bobbi, Frances’s charismatic best friend and ex (Sasha Lane), says: “I love it. You two are such grown-ups.” Buying a home remains a “symbol of being an adult,” said Dak Kopec, a professor in the school of architecture at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who specializes in environmental psychology. But millennials — saddled by student debt and slow to marry or have children — have entered the real estate market more gradually than earlier generations, and the ones now ready to buy are finding low supply and soaring prices. It’s no wonder they’ve become HGTV-devouring, Zillow-surfing daydreamers.Nick and Melissa — who likely considers herself part of the cuspy “Xennial” generation — have achieved the dream of homeownership that eludes many millennials. And the show turns their dwelling into a symbol of anxiety and aspiration.Home decorating has a way of illuminating the gulf between the life you want and the life you have, or the one that you can afford. You may find yourself staring down impossible questions about what your days will look like in two, five or 10 years.“I’ve heard so many couples fight over big rug purchases,” said Aelfie Oudghiri, the 36-year-old founder and creative director of Aelfie, a home décor brand. “It’s this defining feature of their home that’s supposed to indicate what kind of people they are and what kind of future they want to have.” She sees another kind of anxiety crop up in single people: “They don’t want to commit to something because they don’t know if their future hypothetical partner will like it.”Anna Rackard, the show’s production designer, and Sophie Phillips, the set decorator, aimed to create a version of a wealthy person’s house that wouldn’t repulse Frances.HuluFor Frances, Melissa’s home — and according to Anna Rackard, the show’s production designer, “it always felt like we were decorating for Melissa,” rather than Nick — is deeply appealing, despite her outward dismissiveness of the bourgeois lifestyle that it signifies. (Her evident embarrassment when Bobbi tells Nick and Melissa that “Frances is a communist” suggests that her dedication to this ideology isn’t terribly fixed.)Melissa’s spacious office, which Frances peers into while briefly unattended, is littered with books. To a young writer accustomed to working from her bedroom, it’s heaven.For Ms. Rackard and Sophie Phillips, the set decorator, the goal was to create a version of a wealthy person’s house that wouldn’t repulse Frances — that, instead, she’d find cool and aspirational. To make the space feel younger and less fussy, they used plywood for the kitchen doors and decorated the walls with prints and photographs, rather than paintings. Ms. Phillips and Ms. Rackard wanted a spare but slightly rock ’n’ roll look, with furniture and home goods that would make a strong statement on their own.Ms. Rackard and Ms. Phillips see Melissa as someone who is “effortlessly cool,” who has an instinctive sense of style when it comes to putting together a home. But in her considered approach to setting a table with matching colored glassware and bowllike plates, as she does for Frances and Bobbi, you could also read fastidiousness or insecurity.“Melissa is slightly intimidated by Frances, in a way, by her beauty and youth and where she is in this stage of her life, which enables her to be quite carefree,” Ms. Phillips said. “Melissa is at the stage where she’s thinking, ‘Where am I going?’ It makes her very self-conscious in her decisions, to create this ‘perfect’ environment.”According to Samuel Gosling, a psychologist who studies the relationship between people and their living spaces, one of the central functions of our home environments is as an ‘identity claim.’ “These are deliberate statements we want to make about ourselves to others, saying: ‘This is who I am,’” Dr. Gosling said. People generally feel happier when others see them as they see themselves, he said, citing research by Bill Swann, a psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, so much so that being seen in an overly positive light can make us feel misunderstood.This may explain why it pains Melissa so much to feel “pathetic and conventional” in Frances’s eyes, a characterization out of step with the stylish, cultured person her home reveals her to be. It would explain why some people may have mixed feelings about inviting people to homes they share with roommates or others, whose décor choices they fear might be mistaken for their own. For people in their 20s and 30s, the desire to be seen accurately through design choices may be heightened, and perhaps warped, by the desire to perform our style for the public on social media. “Our homes started to look more and more like sets,” Ms. Oudghiri said, noting that bright blocks of color, zany rugs and groovy, selfie-friendly mirrors are often used to make a statement on social media. The soft, unchallenging look known as the “millennial aesthetic,” heavily marketed as a signifier of good taste, often crops up in these spaces. Among young men, the Eames lounger has become a status symbol akin to hard-to-find street wear, telegraphing success to the outside world.Melissa’s muted house doesn’t seem to contain any terrazzo or pastel pink, but it does hit certain design trends that have received the millennial seal of approval. Rebecca Atwood, a 37-year-old artist and textile designer, identified a few: enveloping wall color (that moody gray), goods purchased from brands and makers with a story (those Irish ceramics), an indoor-outdoor feeling (the greenhouse-like dining nook). Ms. Rackard noted that the conservatory’s fashionable glass doors, while perfect for the warm weather of Los Angeles, would be uncommon in Dublin, where double-paneled windows are more suited to the climate. Such is Melissa’s commitment to style, to what people think.Ms. Oudghiri, for her part, isn’t putting too much stock in her own décor. She has been renting a furnished home in Los Angeles decorated by someone with a taste for “rococo looking” furniture.“Interiors matter, to a certain extent. But I’m not on Instagram. Nobody sees the interior of my house, except for my friends,” she said. “As long as my couch is comfortable, I’m happy.” More

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      Melissa Gilbert and Tim Busfield, on Their Upstate Escape

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      The ‘Little House on the Prairie’ star, who has a new memoir out, and her husband, the actor and director, collaborated happily on their Sullivan County retreat. Just don’t ask about the pleather recliner.Almost immediately after Melissa Gilbert and Tim Busfield married in 2013 — the third time for both of them — they swapped the glitter and hustle of Los Angeles for the low-key charms of small-town life in Mr. Busfield’s native Michigan.The experience was a tonic, for sure, but a five-year dose was sufficient. In 2018, Ms. Gilbert, who became a household name at the age of 10 as a star of the long-running series “Little House on the Prairie,” and Mr. Busfield, who is best known for his role on “The West Wing” and his Emmy-winning turn on “Thirtysomething,” relocated to Manhattan’s Upper West Side.Ms. Gilbert, now 58, was quickly cast in “The Dead, 1904,” an immersive theater adaptation of the James Joyce novella. Mr. Busfield, now 64, who is also a director, found work on TV shows like “Law & Order: SVU.”Gainful employment was all well and good, but Mr. Busfield, in particular, felt a lack in the fresh-air department. As Ms. Gilbert writes in her new memoir, “Back to the Prairie: A Home Remade, A Life Rediscovered,” “It became important for us to have a place where we could escape.”A Zillow search led them to Highland Lake, N.Y., a dot on the map in Sullivan County.The actor and former child star Melissa Gilbert, and her husband, the actor and director Tim Busfield, bought a house in Sullivan County in 2019. They call it “the cabbage,” an amalgam of “cabin” and “cottage.”Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesMelissa Gilbert, 58, and Tim Busfield, 64Occupations: She is an actor and writer; he is an actor and director.Big leap of faith on the prairie: “This is one of those places that most people would say, ‘Are you nuts?’ if you expressed interest in buying it,” Ms. Gilbert said. “But Tim and I are the best kind of nuts. We’re hopeful visionaries. We knew this house would shelter us well and serve us well.”What the couple found in their price range — a small structure with halfhearted half-timbering, peeling stucco and an interior crammed with the detritus of the previous owner — wasn’t pretty. But despite the mice and the mold and the mildew (and that awful smell), there was potential.The dropped ceiling in the kitchen hid a cathedral ceiling. The loft would prove to be an ideal music room. The living room had pine paneling and a fireplace. And the 14 bosky acres that came with the ramshackle house were ravishing.“As I stared up at one of the rotting deer heads on the wall, a lifetime of therapy kicked in and I thought I could do something here,” Ms. Gilbert writes in “Back to the Prairie.” “I just had to look past the crap.”Ms. Gilbert, a DIY-er of no mean talent, upholstered the sofa and love seat.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesThe couple closed on the property in January of 2019, dubbed it “the cabbage,” an amalgam of “cabin” and “cottage,” and began mapping out plans for renovation and design.Money was an issue. A can-do spirit was — and is — the currency. “You see that she has overalls on,” Mr. Busfield said with an affectionate look at his wife. “She’ll have a hammer hanging out of one of those pockets in half an hour.”Just one example (or maybe two): After a protracted search, the couple found a sofa that was perfect in every way except color (an unfortunate shade of asphalt gray), so Ms. Gilbert took a chance on some burgundy slipcovers that she found online and then added other fabrics and cushions to create a whole new piece of furniture. She refreshed a love seat in similar fashion, in that case with a burgundy floral pattern and a checkered dust ruffle. For the record, she has also assembled a windmill ceiling fan and a table saw.But the couple called in the pros when necessary — as in the kitchen, where demolition, plumbing and rewiring were involved. They made a virtue out of the tight budget, conjuring a space that looks, delightfully, like a retro diner.The floating shelves were built with recycled bowling-alley wood and painted bright red, a look the couple loved. Ms. Gilbert added interest to the prefab cabinets by decoupaging their sides with recipes from old magazines. A large slice of corrugated tin roofing was sprayed with vinegar to give it a nicely raddled look, then mounted on a wall to hold the couple’s collection of cast-iron cookware. Chrome-and-red-vinyl chairs ring the farm table. Atop the cabinetry are Donald Duck and Olive Oyl figurines, an old set of Lincoln Logs and a vintage Coca-Cola syrup bottle, among other knickknacks.This is the first time, Ms. Gilbert said, that she has decorated a house with full partner participation. Her default in previous houses and previous marriages was “to do everything myself and go, ‘Ta-da! Here it is.’”If you come to visit, it’s likely that your picture will be snapped and added to the photo wall in the living room.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesThat didn’t sit well with Mr. Busfield: “I would just go into whatever house we were in and start to do things, and he would go, ‘Wait a minute. Hello, I’m here.’”They were on the same page about the creation and outfitting of what they call the Woodstock bedroom — the house is a 20-minute drive from the site of the legendary 1969 rock concert. A lava lamp sits on a bureau in the corner, and the wall décor includes a 1960s-themed jigsaw puzzle that the couple assembled, sealed and framed, as well as a poster heralding a concert by The Who.“The room was designed with Pete Townshend in mind,” Mr. Busfield said, referring to the group’s co-founder. “We keep hoping he’ll come by one day and hang out.”The couple were also in agreement about a photo wall of family and friends in the living room. “We have a Polaroid camera that we keep here, and when someone comes to visit or stays over, we take pictures and add them to the wall,” Ms. Gilbert said.Seeing eye to eye is so very satisfying. Marital harmony is such a fine thing. So maybe now isn’t the time to bring up the brown-pleather recliner. Mr. Busfield wanted it and got it. Ms. Gilbert was horrified, she said, and didn’t mince words. She told her husband the chair was horrible, that it was “a grandpa chair.” The long and the short of it: She didn’t want the chair in the house.Mr. Busfield bought the recliner. At first, Ms. Gilbert hated it. Then she co-opted it.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesSo guess who won’t budge from the chair now?“I fell in love with it,” Ms. Gilbert said, shamefacedly. “I knit in it. I sleep in it.”“I’ve sat in it maybe twice in the last year and a half,” Mr. Busfield said.Raised beds for an herb-and-vegetable garden and a chicken coop were added during the Covid lockdown in 2020. Seven hens are currently in residence.Last summer, the couple put in new windows and painted the exterior of the house a soft yellow. Shutters were installed earlier this spring, and climbing roses were planted. There are plans for homemade window boxes this summer.A second bathroom would also be nice (although there is a functioning outhouse, and a couple of bathrooms in the RV that the couple bought to billet guests).“In my opinion, a house is never finished,” Ms. Gilbert said. “It’s always a work in progress.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate. More

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      in Theater

      Joel Grey, on Making a Space for Art and Dreams

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      The prolific actor, writer and photographer just turned 90, in a 1970s-style West Village loft that speaks to his many passions.Rain threatened on a recent Tuesday morning, and there was a chill in the air. But inside Joel Grey’s loft in Manhattan’s West Village, it was spring.Yellow roses — some doing a solo act, some in a clump — pink and yellow tulips, and pink and purple hyacinths sat in various containers on the round table in the open kitchen, on the glass coffee table, on a side table and on the skinny, rectangular dining table. Yet more multicolored roses, splayed atop a cabinet, were — how to put this nicely? — pushing up daisies.Mr. Grey, who won a Tony in 1967 and an Oscar in 1973 for his ineradicable portrayal of the feverishly rouged M.C. in the musical “Cabaret,” stood at the kitchen counter trying to arrange a new grouping of tulips. (He spends $50 a week on flowers at the local Whole Foods.) But these seemed to be an uncooperative bunch. “You kids are being difficult,” he told them, turning away for a minute to say hello to a visitor.Based on the evidence of an admittedly small sample — a reporter, a photographer, a publicist — the eternally pixieish Mr. Grey greets guests as though they were the winning lottery tickets that he thought he’d lost.But perhaps some of this ebullience was situational. “You know, it’s almost my 90th birthday,” he announced, clapping his hands like a delighted child, and leading the way to his office. There, on a hanger, was an orange sweatshirt with “1932” emblazoned in large black numbers on the front. (For the record, April 11 was the day.)“A darling friend gave a sweatshirt to Duane Michals for his 90th birthday, in February,” Mr. Grey said, referring to the photographer. “And I told her, ‘I want one too!’”The Tony- and Oscar-winning actor Joel Grey lives in a loft in the West Village, where he is surrounded by art and the souvenirs of his travels.Stefano Ukmar for The New York TimesJoel Grey, 90Occupation: Actor, writer, photographerNot by design: “My style is not eclectic, but rather serendipity. I’m truly Mr. Serendipity. Nothing I’ve bought was planned. Everything in here is about the moment.”He bought the apartment in the late 1990s, based on a floor plan.“I wanted to be in the Village. It was a whole new world to me,” said Mr. Grey, who had been living on the top floor of the Hotel Des Artistes on West 67th Street in an apartment that was put together, room by room, from former maids’ quarters, and had a skylight and a terrace. “But my brother told me, ‘You can’t live down there.’ At the time, it was very scrubby and scruffy on the streets near the West Side Highway. The place where the boats came in — the piers — it was all very undone.”But what was scrubby and scruffy when measured against proximity to the Hudson River? Mr. Grey watches it roll by from the built-in daybed where he drinks his morning coffee and reads his morning paper: “It’s my friend and my partner and my serenity.”He was further captivated by the “wet-clay” possibilities of a new-construction building. “It was about open space,” he said, “which I found so alluring, and about the mystery of how to make it a home. It was an adventure.”Mr. Grey’s well-traveled Vuitton trunks have been repurposed as side tables.Stefano Ukmar for The New York TimesA very personal adventure. There’s no interest here in showing off designers or making vignettes. Minimalist and neutral, with clean lines, columns and concrete floors, the apartment is part 1970s SoHo loft, part midcentury-modern design, with a cowhide rug on the floor of the bedroom, a cowhide-covered butterfly chair and a Jens Risom woven chair.“But I don’t think about periods,” Mr. Grey said. “I think about exclamation points.”Perhaps the exclamation points are the works of art: by, among others, Richard Tuttle, Robert Rauschenberg, Jim Dine, Joan Miró, Sally Gall and Mr. Michals. Woodcarvings of antelope heads stand in a row on a windowsill. African sculptures dot the piano. There’s a galley wall in the primary bathroom.Mr. Grey is, of course, best known as an actor and director (of the acclaimed 2018 Yiddish version of “Fiddler on the Roof”), and he continues to perform. He is part of the cast of “The Old Man,” a series scheduled to premiere on FX in mid-June. “I am not the old man,” he said, before anyone has a chance to ask.When Mr. Grey directed a Yiddish version of “Fiddler on the Roof,” his assistant gave him an appropriately themed pincushion. Stefano Ukmar for The New York TimesBut over the past dozen and a half years, Mr. Grey has also made a name for himself as a photographer. His work has been the focus of gallery shows and of several monographs. His most recent book of photographs, “The Flower Whisperer,” published in 2019, paid tribute to the nether regions of daisies, sunflowers, lilies, daffodils et al.Stuck inside during the pandemic, Mr. Grey began looking for — and photographing — the faces he saw in dried petals. They will be the subject of his next book. “Look up there. It’s a whole new world,” he said, pointing to a detail in the image of a dead blossom hanging on a partition in his office. “I see a bow tie.”Art and design have long been a part of his life. Growing up in Cleveland, the 8-year-old Joel fantasized about getting lost at the local museum and shut in overnight. Later, as work began taking him out of town, he invariably returned to New York with crafts. When, at the age of 19, he went to London to play the Palladium, he visited Positano, Italy, “and now I am looking at these monkey candlesticks I brought home,” he said, nodding toward the coffee table.A friend gave Mr. Grey a sweatshirt as a 90th-birthday present.Stefano Ukmar for The New York TimesShelves in Mr. Grey’s closet/dressing room display marionettes from Mexico; figures, bowls, vases and baskets from European ports; and, a little closer to home, collages made by his mother, Grace.The mother-son relationship, as chronicled in Mr. Grey’s 2016 memoir, “Master of Ceremonies,” was complicated. But it was because of Grace, he said, that even as a struggling actor, he cared deeply about his surroundings.“I always did up my apartments, even if I only spent a dollar and a quarter,” he said. “My mother and father taught me the importance of being professional and of making a place for myself. And my mother was all about making a space for art.”He has made the place and made the space. “It was all about, ‘Let’s figure this out,’” Mr. Grey said. “‘Let’s dream a little here.’ I’m a big believer in dreams.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate. More

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      in Theater

      Where Jerry Zaks Goes to Escape the ‘Pure Pleasure’ of the Theater

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      The director of ‘The Music Man’ pays more attention to the furnishings onstage than to those at home. But that suits him fine.Jerry Zaks has never been much for turning an apartment into a home.He likes things clean, and he likes things comfortable. But beyond those basics, his interest kind of stalls out. An actor turned four-time Tony Award-winning director, he’s too wrapped up in second-act curtains to ponder living room curtains.“I think most of my places have looked like the dorm when I was in college, because I’ve been too busy working and getting the work done,” said Mr. Zaks, 75, who most recently shepherded the Broadway revival of “The Music Man,” starring Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster, and the musical adaptation of the film “Mrs. Doubtfire” (which resumes performances April 14 after a Covid-related hiatus). Among his two dozen other directing credits: “The House of Blue Leaves,” “Six Degrees of Separation,” the Steve Martin comedy “Meteor Shower” and the 2017 revival of “Hello, Dolly!”The celebrated Broadway director Jerry Zaks, whose current projects are “The Music Man” and “Mrs. Doubtfire,” lives in a two-bedroom apartment  on the Upper West Side. Photographs, ephemera and Hirschfeld caricatures, including one of himself, hang in his kitchen.Katherine Marks for The New York Times“When I’m going home,” he continued, “I’m not escaping from anything except pure pleasure, which is the theater or my rehearsal room.”Jerry Zaks, 75Occupation: DirectorMaking the scene: “I’ve never paid a lot of attention to how my apartment looks. I’ve paid more attention to the set design of my show. I love participating in the creation of the world that is going to house the show I’m doing.”Since moving to New York in 1969 after graduate school, Mr. Zaks has lived uptown and down, in hovels and in storied buildings like the El Dorado, where the apartment he shared with his wife, the actress Jill Rose, and two daughters overlooked Central Park and was big enough that he could chalk up a constitutional — he is an obsessive walker — simply by striding from one end of the space to the other.Mr. Zaks has a unique copy of “Encyclopedia of Jews in Sports.” It contains a meticulously crafted gag entry written by a friend about one Jerry Zaks, “after Tiger Woods, the most exciting amateur golfer of the 1990s…”Katherine Marks for The New York TimesBut time marches on, and with the dissolution of his marriage, Mr. Zaks did, too. He moved to one rental near the El Dorado, then another, to stay in proximity to his children, now adults. In 2008, he found a more permanent perch, in the shape of a two-bedroom co-op with prewar details, on West End Avenue.At the time, Mr. Zaks was in Los Angeles directing episodic television, and his then girlfriend had taken up the apartment search, sending him photos and descriptions of appealing prospects.“When I came back to New York, I went once and took a look, and said, ‘Let’s do it,’” recalled Mr. Zaks, who commented very favorably on a renovation by the seller that combined the kitchen and dining room into one warm, open space.That same girlfriend helped Mr. Zaks outfit the apartment. “On stage, I want to know how I get in and out of the living room. I want to know how the couch relates to the table,” he said. “But for my own apartment, I didn’t really get involved. She would show me pictures, and I would say, ‘This looks good.’”A caramel-colored leather sofa and easy chair looked good to Mr. Zaks. So did an Arts-and-Crafts sideboard, a free-standing bookcase of similar style and a rectangular wood dining table.Among his favorite possessions: a travel bar set once owned by Zero Mostel.Katherine Marks for The New York Times“Some of the earliest work on ‘Hello, Dolly!,’ ‘Meteor Shower,’ ‘The Music Man’ and ‘Mrs. Doubtfire’ was done around that table,” he said. “I don’t need an office. I just need a good kitchen table.”Mr. Zaks would like to be a minimalist, but not quite yet. In a corner of the kitchen, which is painted a nice shade of coral, a tall stack of scripts and research material related to “The Music Man” and “Mrs. Doubtfire” seems to be awaiting further instructions. “I haven’t thrown them out yet because I can’t,” he said.Covering the walls are framed notes and letters of appreciation from colleagues like Neil Simon and Harold Prince (“I loved him because he was the last person in show business to call me ‘kid,’” Mr. Zaks said). There are several Al Hirschfeld caricatures, including one of Mr. Zaks in 1980, when he appeared on Broadway in the musical revue “Tintypes,” as well as ephemera like a two-page spread from the script of Thornton Wilder’s play “The Matchmaker.” (The source material for “Hello, Dolly!,” it was a gift from the administrators of the playwright’s estate when Mr. Zaks’s “Dolly” revival opened.)The cache of show posters — “my little shrine to myself” — represents Mr. Zaks both as performer (fun fact: he was a replacement Kenickie in the original production of “Grease”) and director. “This is a partial display including my greatest successes and, well, let’s put it this way: You’ve got hits and you’ve got misses,” he said. “Hits are better, but you’d be a fool not to remember the misses, because you work just as hard on them.”All pretty impressive, but nothing has quite the resonance of a photograph of a 20-something Jerry Zaks posing with his parents and Zero Mostel. Mr. Zaks was playing Motel the tailor in a tent-theater summer tour of “Fiddler on the Roof”; Mr. Mostel was reprising his Tony-winning performance as Tevye, while taking on an additional role: rumbustious mentor to his young castmate.Meet Mr. Zaks’s friends Tony, Tony, Tony, Tony and George. Katherine Marks for The New York Times“When I was a junior at Dartmouth and declared I was going to be an actor, my parents were very disappointed — a waste of an Ivy League education and all that,” Mr. Zaks said. “They were afraid for me. They were Holocaust survivors, and there was a Nazi around every corner.”But of course, they came to see their son in action, and afterward, went backstage to meet Mr. Mostel. “For 20 minutes, they spoke Yiddish to Zero, tummeling back and forth,” he recalled. “And finally my father asked, ‘Is my son going to be all right in this farkakte business?’ And Zero answered, ‘He’s going to be more than all right.’ And then we took the picture.”“That was the beginning of my parents accepting what I was committed to,” added Mr. Zaks, who counts among his favorite opening-night gifts a travel cocktail bar set that once belonged to Mr. Mostel.A while back, he was returning from a favorite neighborhood spot, Silver Moon Bakery, when he ran into a fellow co-op resident, Melissa Gooding, who was out walking her dog. “She moved in shortly after I did, but we didn’t get to know each other closely until last year,” Mr. Zaks said.He now divides his time between their two apartments. On the mantel in Ms. Gooding’s apartment are Mr. Zaks’s four Tony statuettes, along with a Mr. Abbott award, a tribute named for the legendary man of the theater, George Abbott. On a wall in the hall is a framed photo snapped by the stage doorman at the Winter Garden Theatre, home of “The Music Man”: Mr. Zaks huddling with Ms. Foster and Mr. Jackman at the end of a performance.“It’s hard to talk about without getting emotional,” he said. “This is my everything.”“The relationship I have with my actors is the most precious thing I have outside of family,” he continued, “and it’s encapsulated in this one image.”Mr. Jackman and Ms. Foster had the photo blown up as a gift for Mr. Zaks. He may not care much about décor, but he knows what makes him feel at home.For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate. More

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      in Music

      A Rising Designer Brings Hip-Hop to Homeware

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      Sean Brown is the creative force behind Curves, a home décor brand inspired by African American pop culture. “I always aim to celebrate Blackness,” he said.The Toronto-based designer Sean Brown made a splash in 2020 with rugs inspired by classic CDs that you might have come across while scrolling through Instagram. In just a few years, Curves, which started with an event at a Toronto gallery, has grown into a contemporary homeware brand that offers products inspired by hip-hop (a color-changing umbrella featuring lyrics from Mobb Deep and Missy Elliott; a grocery tote depicting music video stills), stocked by stores around the globe.But Brown, 35, did not have a typical designer’s childhood filled with trips to art galleries and museums. Growing up in a strict household in Toronto, he rebelled after his parents’ divorce, landing in a group home at 14 and then in a foster home until he was 19. (He’s since reconciled with his parents, he said.) As he bounced around high schools without graduating, he started designing T-shirts.He would eventually do a year at a design school, where his interest in fashion and hip-hop intensified. Diddy in particular had an outsized influence on him. “I studied every outfit, I studied every step, I studied every chain,” he said of the rap mogul. “Everything about him I studied. The cover art. The art direction. The jiggy, the shiny suits. He has so much to do with my outlook on aesthetics.”A view of some of Brown’s CD rugs, left, and his vintage magazine collection.Brendan Ko for The New York TimesIn 2013, he and a friend started a pop-up vintage store, then came NEEDS & WANTS, a men’s sportswear brand from Brown and his partners. (The label’s varsity jacket landed in GQ.) Brown began working with the Canadian R&B singer Daniel Caesar on wardrobe styling, photography, graphic design and directing. Thus began a career in the music industry, where he’d handle design in various capacities for artists like SZA and Baby Keem.Meanwhile, he released a number of design objects, including a throw blanket and a puzzle set. When the pandemic hit, “I was like, I don’t think it’s going to get normal anytime soon, so let me settle into this new apartment,” he said. “I need a rug, I need a coffee table. Then it just turned into home décor.” Curves recently issued the Archway Chair and Puddle Mirror.At an interview in Brooklyn, where he was shooting and interviewing subjects for a new biannual magazine, tentatively set to be released in early 2022, Brown spoke enthusiastically about making design accessible, the influence of the video director Hype Williams and Brown’s very short stint in Diddy’s universe. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.How do you define the Curves brand?To encourage people to think about the space that they occupy or where they come from, how it looks, how it affects their quality of life. A contemporary take on everyday objects. The starting point usually has cultural nuances. I’m always injecting culture into it. Black culture, Black music, Black art — always celebrating that. The other part about Curves is making design accessible to the people who need to be introduced to design.So far, most people know you for those rugs that look like CDs. Any worry that they will overshadow your newer work?It’s important to always keep doing things that people care about and to keep creative and to keep curious. That’s why I was like, yo, let’s do mirrors, let’s do incense hands, let’s do shelving, let’s do chairs. It’s almost like a hit song. Once you get three hit songs, people know you’re here to stay.Two of Brown’s decorative floor mirrors.James LeeWhat is the process from idea to physical product?So it’s like, OK, I really want to do a puddle mirror and then Iva Golubovic [his manager and a co-owner and creative producer of Curves] will be like, ‘I feel you, slow down.’ Then she’ll go and find someone like a manufacturer who can do the thing and just work through it with them, the technical aspect, and then bring in an engineer.Now we linked up with these guys who are our mill workers and they’re just as passionate as we are. And now we’re going to go full blown into furniture at this point, like bed heads, tables.You collect vintage magazines like Vibe. Why do you like print so much?Starting to own media, by way of the internet, I didn’t have to go to a library and open up books anymore. But then once my brain felt like the information was too overloaded, that’s when I wanted to dial it back, start being like, remember all the magazines you used to collect? Remember all the tangible data where you could just flip through? I was a liner notes kid, you know what I mean? So I think that that’s getting lost right now, heavily. People’s reference points and their research is very shallow. I have the physical data of history to be able to go back to these magazines and be like, yo, there was a time Foxy Brown [was] in the Calvin Klein ad or Erykah Badu for Gap. I have all of it. The tangible, beyond Tumblr.Where else do you turn for inspiration?Old music, old movies, old commercials, old media, but only to reference and not copy. Like, how can I reimagine this thing? Still Tumblr, honestly. Tumblr is like my collection of media in digital form. It doesn’t come with the social aspect of social media. You can just be on there, in your own world, dictating your own tastes, whatever you want to see.You also seem to have a real affinity for the director Hype Williams, who made his name making music videos for artists like Missy Elliott, Busta Rhymes and the Notorious B.I.G. in the 1990s.Him and [the artist and filmmaker] Kahlil Joseph, they can take something like the hood or like a housing project and make it look so beautiful. They make it look like high art. I was watching as a child without knowing the political side of it, like how the government takes these people who are disenfranchised and throws them in a housing project. But then out of it you get a genre like hip-hop. That’s why when I think through design, I always aim to celebrate Blackness because a lot of it is birthed out of disparity. We’re given these [expletive] circumstances and then we can make something so beautiful out of it.You can see the lineage from a Hype, who was so influenced by Stanley Kubrick. You can see connections if you watch [“2001: A Space Odyssey.”] You can see Missy Elliott and Busta videos in a lot of that, if you’re really paying attention. But obviously Stanley Kubrick wasn’t coming from a housing project in New York. And that is the missing link. There have to be people in history who can make connections. I’m always at the intersection of things.The Archway Chair is one of the latest products from Curves.James LeeYou contributed creative direction to Diddy’s Combs Enterprises for only eight months, before parting ways.I was 34. I wasn’t a kid who was looking for an opportunity; I wasn’t trying to be an intern. I knew who I was and I was there to tell the truth. And what I believe was the intent to protect his creative and to take his creative to another level. Once we realized that that wasn’t sustainable, I just couldn’t go along with the program of being a yes man, I just wasn’t going to do it. The truth is, for a person who wants things done a certain way and wants everyone to go along with the program, I’m a cancer to all that. I have to be honest. If that meant losing a gig with him, then so be it. The next day I went right back to wearing Sean John. [A spokeswoman for Combs Enterprises declined to comment.]You don’t seem bitter.No. Look where I’m coming from — I’m the little foster kid.How much do you think Instagram is shaping how we’re designing our homes, and is that good or bad?It’s why I love Tumblr, because it’s the media without the social, so you could pick apart inspiration, download it, be inspired by things, decorate your home off that and there’s no pressure of the social community. Instagram is like the same thing: You have access to information overload, seeing everyone decorate their homes, but now you’re under pressure because, like, who likes it? I just think the social part of things is bad, but I don’t think the sharing part is bad.I think it’s great that you could see into so many people’s homes. I think that’s fire.Brendan Ko for The New York TimesThat could be an added layer of pressure, because so much homeware is expensive. A millennial person could think, “I want to show off my house, but I can’t afford all that.” There’s a class boundary and a level of insecurity that comes up for some people.Start small. You ain’t got to have the large three way couch. Start with a shower curtain. The CD rugs.Is there a dollar amount that equals success for you?Not a dollar amount, but I would say enough, enough provision. So that I’m content in a sense where I’m not trying to be filthy rich. I don’t need to own a basketball team, but I like nice things. I want to be able to provide for my family. I want to be able to put money away. I want to be able to give things back. It has to do with the word completion, being complete, feeling complete, completing the mission, being your complete self. More

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      in Television

      LaChanze, at Home in ‘The Color Purple’ House

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      The Westchester house where the Tony-winning actor lives is ideally sized for family reunions — and for spending time alone.“The Color Purple” house — that’s how the actor LaChanze refers to her five-bedroom home in lower Westchester County, N.Y. This has nothing to do with the exterior (it’s gray) or the interior (plum, lavender, lilac, fuchsia, mulberry and violet are underrepresented).But it has everything to do with LaChanze’s Tony-winning performance in the 2005 musical adaptation of Alice Walker’s celebrated novel. “Being in ‘The Color Purple’ was how I was able to buy the house,” said LaChanze, who is currently starring in the limited-run Broadway production — through Jan. 9 — of Alice Childress’s 1955 comedy-drama “Trouble in Mind.”Her other Broadway credits include “Once on This Island” (1990),“If/Then” (2014) and “Summer: The Donna Summer Musical” (2018). She won an Emmy in 2010 for the PBS special “Handel’s Messiah Rocks: A Joyful Noise.”Sixteen years ago, after considering various housing possibilities, LaChanze settled on the suburbs, because she wanted her children, Celia Rose Gooding, now 21, an actor, and Zaya LaChanze Gooding, 20, a college student, to have firsthand knowledge of lawns and trees. For herself, she wanted relatively new construction.“I knew I’d be living alone,” said LaChanze, 60, whose husband of three years, Calvin Gooding, a trader at Cantor Fitzgerald, died in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. “I knew I didn’t know how do repairs. It narrowed my options, because many of the properties in Westchester are much older.”“My mother always stressed that when you walk in the front door you should leave behind everything from the world outside,” said LaChanze. “I’ve incorporated that feeling into our living space.”Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesLaChanze, 60Occupation: ActorGreat performance: “People love to watch me make fried chicken on Instagram. My mother used to say, ‘If you can’t make a meal in under 30 minutes, then you’re not a good cook.’”“I was lucky,” she continued. “I found a house that was built in 2000. I’m the second owner.”She was, perhaps, even luckier in what surrounded the house: abundant greenery and a yard that was hard by both a park and the Bronx River.“People can’t cross over, so it’s like my own piece of the water,” LaChanze said. “It’s quiet and scenic. That’s pretty much what sold me.”She has since added a firepit and affixed a set of wind chimes to a birch tree near the deck. They ring in the key of A. “I love that,” she said. “A lot of Negro spirituals are written in that key. You hear that chord? It’s just beautiful.”Unlike those chimes, the house needed some fine-tuning. It had style, for sure; it just wasn’t LaChanze’s particular style.LaChanze’s three cats have the run of the house.Tony Cenicola/The New York Times“There were gold-plated fixtures and I was, like, ‘Nooooo,’” she said. Out they went, replaced by nickel.Down came the columns between the den and the kitchen to create an expansive space, and bookcases were built on either side of the fireplace. (One of the shelves holds a steel remnant from the twin towers.) Marble countertops, a marble floor, a glass-tile backsplash in shades of brown and copper, and a few coats of butter-yellow paint were part of the kitchen overhaul.“I kind of went to work in here a little bit,” LaChanze said with a laugh. “All my friends and fans who follow me on Instagram know what my kitchen looks like.”You can easily tell that this is the residence of someone who works in the arts. The framed awards and piles of scripts in the office, the area set up for recording sessions, the show posters on the wall in the basement gym, all make the point.“I recently did Spike Lee’s documentary on HBO,” LaChanze said, referring to “NYC Epicenters 9/11→2021 ½”. “He gave me a copy of the poster for the show and signed it for me.”LaChanze, a fan of the game bid whist, estimates that she has some 100 decks of cards.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesIt’s equally clear that this is the home of someone who cares about art. “I’m a little bit of a collector,” LaChanze said. “I call my foyer my international space, because I travel quite a bit and I have a bunch of art from a lot of different places” — a door from Nigeria, a drawing etched on the bark of a tree from Tonga, dung art from Rwanda.The foyer also holds a thriving fiddle-leaf fig, one of two that LaChanze, an enthusiastic gardener, bought this summer at Costco — for the bargain price of $69 each, she is proud to tell you — and has been tending ever since, first out on the deck, now by the stairs that lead to the second floor.“I just love it to death. Look how big it is,” she said, sounding like a very proud mother.And there, in a nutshell, you have the primary business that’s conducted at LaChanze’s house: nurturing.Here is where the actor’s large, far-flung family gathers twice a year for reunions, and where falling asleep on the custom-designed, brown crushed-velvet sectional in the den is encouraged. Here, too, is where a group of card-playing cronies comes every month for an evening of bid whist.“It’s something that’s big in my culture,” LaChanze said. “When I was young, my parents were playing with their friends, but then someone had to leave. They came and got me and taught me the game, so they could keep going, because you need four people.”Her affection for the game and its key component has stuck: She has amassed 100 decks of very elegant cards.“OK, so one night I was going down the internet rabbit hole, and I discovered this group of people in a card-collection club,” LaChanze said. “I joined, and every few months I get sent a new deck by a new designer. There are a lot of, I would say, biker dudes and magicians in the club, and it’s really a lot of fun to talk to these guys across the country about what we love about our cards.”“My mother used to say, ‘If you can’t make a meal in under 30 minutes, then you’re not a good cook,’” said LaChanze, who demonstrates how to pull off this culinary trick to her fans on Instagram.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesNear where LaChanze sets up the card table in the basement is a sofa upholstered in green velvet. “This is the first sofa my husband and I bought together,” she said, gently patting a cushion. “We were at Bloomingdale’s, and I was telling him that I’d love a good deep couch that we could spoon on and not feel uncomfortable. We both fit on this.”She added: “I’ve kept it so that my girls can have a little piece of their daddy in here.”When LaChanze comes home from the theater, she greets her three cats and then heads out to the deck, often with a glass of wine in hand, and listens to the wind chimes, or takes a walk down to the water or to the firepit.“I love my home,” she said simply. “My friends are telling me, ‘Well, LaChanze, you’re getting older. Your daughters are gone all the time. Why do you want to live in this big place alone?’”Alone? That’s not how she views it.She has her slice of the river. She has the stars. She has what she calls the heart-of-the-house light, a lamp in the dining room that is never switched off. She falls asleep every night to the lullaby of the Metro-North train whistle.“I love hearing that sound,” LaChanze said. “Because it reminds me I’m not by myself.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate. More

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      Why an NPR Quiz Show Panelist Loves Her ‘Messy Apartment’

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      Faith Salie, known for, among other things, her role on ‘Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me!,’ is ‘evangelical about the Upper West Side.’Faith Salie — a panelist on the NPR quiz show “Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!,” a contributor to “CBS News Sunday Morning,” a podcast host (her latest, “Broadway Revival,” debuted Nov. 18), an actor, an author, a baker (her Coca-Cola cake, made from her mother’s recipe, is serious business), a Rhodes scholar (life isn’t fair) and a charmer — lives with her two children and one husband, as she puts it, in a postwar high-rise near Lincoln Center.“We love this area so much that it’s hard to look elsewhere for something more spacious or more affordable,” said Ms. Salie, 50, whose solo show, “Approval Junkie,” based on her 2016 essay collection of the same name, runs through Dec. 12 at the Minetta Lane Theatre. (It will also be recorded as an Audible Original.) “I’m evangelical about the Upper West Side.”She could probably learn to warble hosannas about other parts of town — yes, Ms. Salie can sing, too — but since moving to Manhattan from Los Angeles in 2006 to be the host of the short-lived news-and-entertainment radio show “Fair Game,” she has lived exclusively in a square-mile-and-a-half area bordered by Central Park West and Broadway.The art wall in the dining area is very well populated.Katherine Marks for The New York TimesFaith Salie, 50Occupation: journalist, performer, authorManhattan matriculation: “A friend told me, ‘You are so lucky to live in this apartment, because when you live in New York it’s like you’re at university, and the whole city is your campus and your home is your dorm.’ I try to remember that.”“When I came here, I was separated from my wasband, which is what I call my first husband,” Ms. Salie said. “And over a period of four years, I sublet three furnished apartments. That was my journey until I met my second husband,” she said, referring to John Semel, an education technology executive, whom she married in 2011.“I felt some sort of comfort in the transience of the places I was living,” Ms. Salie continued. “I was actually relieved, because I didn’t feel settled personally. I had so many questions: When is my divorce going to come through? Am I going to marry again? Will I ever become a mother? How will I become a mother on my own?”There was one question she didn’t have to answer, she said: “What kind of furniture do you want? The furniture I want is whatever is here.”The living room in the two-bedroom rental that Faith Salie shares with her husband, John Semel, an executive in education technology, and the couple’s two children, Augustus, 9, and Minerva, 7, is a permanent construction site.Katherine Marks for The New York TimesMs. Salie was pregnant at her wedding, something she loves to mention because, she said, it makes her sound modern. Thus, there was some urgency to finding a rental in her preferred neighborhood and settling in before baby Augustus, now 9, was born. (Daughter Minerva followed two years later.)“John had always lived on the Upper East Side,” Ms. Salie said. “And he always tells me, ‘You were adamant about staying on the Upper West Side, and I was adamant about staying married to you.’”Besides being a good guy, Mr. Semel is good with spreadsheets. He laid out all the possibilities and found the right place: a two-bedroom with nice light and a terrace. Also, fortunately, he came to the union with some “grown-up man” furniture “that he was very proud of,” Ms. Salie said.The haul included a Minotti sofa, a Ligne Roset glass-fronted curio cabinet that was a floor model, a Ligne Roset dining table and chairs, and a pair of Charles Pollock chairs, along with an Eileen Gray marble-topped coffee table that had been in Mr. Semel’s childhood home.“John’s furniture was just fine,” Ms. Salie said. “It’s not my taste, but I don’t know that I have such fully formed taste that I can articulate what my taste actually is. When you’re renting and when you have kids, there are many times when you say, ‘It’s fine.’”To be sure, many things here are a good deal more than fine to Ms. Salie. They tend to be pieces from her travels with Mr. Semel: two rugs and a fanciful painting from the Medina in Fez; a Berber door, also from Morocco, that sits atop the credenza in the entryway; cushions from Paris, London, Venice and Hong Kong that line the sofa; and a large cloth napkin from a restaurant in Florence, Italy, that hangs over Minerva’s bed.The dragon cushion is a replacement for the one Ms. Salie and Mr. Semel bought on a trip to Hong Kong. “We loved it hard,” Ms. Salie said of the original.Katherine Marks for The New York Times“The chef heard that we were on our honeymoon,” Ms. Salie recalled, “and he came out from the kitchen with a box of markers and made the most whimsical drawing on the napkin, put his hand in John’s espresso and threw some on the picture, then brought out some limoncello and sprinkled that on the picture.”But Ms. Salie seems to derive the greatest pleasure from the furniture and objects that speak to the discreet charms of family life: the purple recliner in the bedroom that she sat in to nurse her children; the artwork taped or pushpinned to a wall in the dining nook; the battery of Legos; the picture books arrayed on a library-style cart in the living room; the photos and magnetic alphabet letters affixed to the refrigerator; Augustus’s stuffed animals gathered on a section of his bed that Minerva, 7, calls “the dairy-o” (perhaps a reference to “The Farmer in the Dell,” but no one in the family is certain).The blessed patch of fresh air otherwise known as the terrace is where Mr. Semel smokes one of the more than 300 pipes in his collection, where he and Ms. Salie snap the children’s first-day-of-the-school-year photos and where they gathered every evening during the height of the pandemic to cheer for frontline workers.“It’s a very emotional place,” Ms. Salie said.A large, framed cloth napkin from a restaurant in Florence, Italy, hangs over Minerva’s bed; it’s a memento from her parents’ honeymoon.Katherine Marks for The New York TimesWhen she and Mr. Semel moved into the apartment, the space seemed ample. Ten years on, they’re bursting at the seams. It helps some that Ms. Salie has rented a one-bedroom unit a floor below to use as an office and as a studio where she records her podcasts.When she is feeling most frustrated — perhaps she has just stepped on an errant Lego piece or is futilely trying to make room on a wall for her children’s latest masterpieces — she quickly regroups.“I think, ‘You know what? If I were a set designer for a play and I wanted to show a house that was fun and not too fancy and a place of joy with parents who treasured their children, what would it look like?’” Ms. Salie said. “And I think it would probably look just like our messy apartment.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate. More

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      in Theater

      How to Decorate Your Apartment Like an Artistic Director

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      When Charlotte Moore moved into John McMartin’s Upper West Side co-op, it was ‘not pretty.’ Nearly five decades later, that’s been fixed.In 1971, Charlotte Moore auditioned for “A Little Night Music” on the stage of the Winter Garden Theater, where the musical “Follies” was playing. (Readers will soon see that this is not an irrelevant detail.)Ms. Moore, who tends toward the dramatic, a trait that has likely served her well as a founder and the artistic director of the Irish Repertory Theater, insists to this day that her tryout, in front of the director Harold Prince, was “a disaster, a complete disaster — I was in tears and ruins, absolute ruins, embarrassed and humiliated.”But maybe not such a disaster. A year later, Mr. Prince phoned her with an invitation to join the fledgling New Phoenix Repertory Company. “When I decided to throw everything away and come here without knowing anyone at all, it was a ridiculous idea,” said Ms. Moore, whose adaptation of Dion Boucicault’s “The Streets of New York,” originally staged by her at the Irish Rep in 2001, begins performances there again, under her direction, on Dec. 4.“I knew nothing. But I just did it,” continued Ms. Moore, who grew up in a small farming community in Illinois, the granddaughter of Irish immigrants, and studied theater at Washington University in St. Louis.“I wanted very much for Jack to be comfortable,” said Charlotte Moore, who shared a one-bedroom co-op on the Upper West Side with her partner, the actor John McMartin, for more than 40 years.Katherine Marks for The New York TimesShe rented an apartment on Riverside Drive and began to settle in. Not long after signing the lease, Ms. Moore met John McMartin, one of the stars of “Follies,” which had recently closed. Now he, too, was part of the New Phoenix troupe.“I was madly in love with him on Day 1, although I didn’t know anything about him and hadn’t seen him in anything. I didn’t see ‘Follies,’ to my horror,” said the now 80-ish Ms. Moore.That lapse was apparently forgiven. A bit more than a year later, she moved in with Mr. McMartin, a divorcé who owned a large one-bedroom co-op with a private entrance on West End Avenue.She is still there. Mr. McMartin, who died in 2016, bequeathed the apartment to his two children, Ms. Moore said, “but he said specifically in his will that I am to be here as long as I want, and I would never leave.”During her first days in residence, she took the measure of her new home and found it wanting. “Jack had been living the bachelor’s life there since his divorce, and it was not pretty,” she said. “When I say, ‘Not pretty,’ that’s a gross understatement.”There was, for starters, a bed in the living room, mounted on two-by-fours. “Oh, my God, I was stunned,” she said. “I was stunned.”Charlotte Moore, 80-ishOccupation: Actor, co-founder and artistic director of the Irish Repertory TheaterMaking room: “We never did any structural work on the apartment. All I did was kind of refurnish the place, and arranged the spaces the way they were supposed to be.”Forty-five years on, the apartment is structurally as Ms. Moore found it. But she has determinedly changed it from crash pad to adult home.When outfitting the living room, she took her cues from her mother. “She hated modernity and loved classic rooms,” Ms. Moore said. Thus, the pale-green-and-gray velvet sofa with leaf patterning, the accent chair in a floral print, the nicely faded Persian rug and the four high-backed dining chairs that she inherited from her grandmother. Ms. Moore cleverly turned the foyer into a cozy TV room — she disapproves of televisions in living rooms, never mind beds — with a pair of chocolate-brown leather club chairs.Dark wood bookcases in the living room and TV room hold Ms. Moore’s many books about Napoleon (“I don’t know why, but I’m a Napoleon freak”); her books on Ireland (“Obviously, I have lots of books about Ireland”); and a mass of tiny glass and plastic pigs.Ms. Moore converted the foyer of the apartment to a TV room.Katherine Marks for The New York Times“I collect pigs, and Jack McMartin bought me a pig every birthday,” she said. “Napoleon and pigs — I don’t know why they go together.”While Ms. Moore summarily chucked some offending pieces when she moved in — goodbye to the hulking cabinet in the middle of the kitchen — she didn’t completely clean house. A much-loved breakfast table that was surrounded by a pair of rattan chairs and a curved banquette is still there. So is a hutch that holds her substantial cache of delft pitchers, vases, platters, cups and plates. Hanging above is a framed trio of Beatrix Potter illustrations featuring a rabbit, a gift from Mr. McMartin.Perhaps unsurprisingly, some of Ms. Moore’s favorite pieces in the apartment — the two flowered cushions on the banquette, the large, square wood coffee table in the living room and the vintage baby grand — are from stage sets. The piano has a particularly winning provenance: It was part of the scenery in the 1983 touring production of “Private Lives” that starred Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and featured John Cullum and Ms. Moore.“I’m not swearing to this, but I might have said, ‘You know, Richard, the only thing I hate to leave in this show is the damn piano. I love it so much. I think it’s so beautiful,’” said Ms. Moore, who composed the songs for “The Streets of New York” on that very instrument. “Well, one day, there it was, at the door of my apartment.”“All I did was kind of refurnish the place,” Ms. Moore said.Katherine Marks for The New York TimesMr. McMartin is very much a presence. He smiles from photographs. His books, many inscribed, still line the shelves. The gloves that were part of his costume in a Broadway production of “Chemin de Fer” hang in a frame near the living room. On a recent morning, Ms. Moore reached behind a bookcase and pulled out the cane that Mr. McMartin wielded during the shattering “Live, Laugh, Love” production number at the end of “Follies.”“Jack Cassidy came in here one time,” Ms. Moore said, referring to the Tony-winning actor. “And he said, ‘John, it’s time you did something with this place, because it’s a special place.’ I felt that way about it, too.”“I wanted very much for him to be comfortable and live in a pretty place,” she continued. “No, that’s not it. I wanted to live in a pretty place. I grew up in a nice house — a lovely house, actually — and I wanted this apartment to be wonderful. For both of us.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate. More