“You don’t give up a 1,400-square-foot Upper West Side apartment,” said Tobi Wright, “not for a relationship, not for anything.” An advertising art director-turned-interior designer, Ms. Wright was speaking on the phone from the apartment in question, a 12th-floor rental in the West 100s she has occupied on and off since the age of 4.
At 32, after bouncing around different New York City domiciles, she returned to take over the rent-stabilized lease from her mother. That was a generation ago. Today, Ms. Wright, 52, pays about $1,700 a month for the unit, which would be unrecognizable to her preschool self. She has turned the living room into a simulated suburban backyard with AstroTurf flooring, a wood wall and the mural of trees. (She was inspired by a former boyfriend’s house in New Jersey.) Her bedroom, which used to be her artist father’s painting studio, is cerulean blue and chock-full of circles — in the carpet, the dresser, the lampshade. Hell, the lamp.
Ms. Wright’s investment in upgrades was carefully considered, as might be expected from someone who lacks an ownership stake. She spent $20,000 on the living room makeover. “For me that was a lot of money for one room,” she said. “And it had to be just right.” On the one hand, she had the walls skim coated to erase what she described as the “orange peel” effect of decades of accumulated paint jobs; on the other, she cobbled together fish traps found on Etsy to make the light fixture. And though the outcome was transformative, she didn’t make any change so invasive as to alarm the landlord.
“Nothing is permanent,” she said. “The wood wall can be removed easily and nail holes patched. The wallpaper was pre-glued so it just requires moisture to remove.”
To be the tenant of a radically cheap New York City apartment is to be a prisoner of fortune. You are held captive by your golden lease. But renters like Ms. Wright show how one can customize a home for the comfortable long-haul, making it as personal as any place one would feel free to love and leave.
Michael Yarinsky, the co-founder of an interdisciplinary design studio called Office of Tangible Space, divides his life between two rentals, a 700-square-foot primary home in Bushwick, Brooklyn, for which he pays $2,200 a month, including utilities, and a 1,000-square-foot weekend retreat on the North Fork of Long Island that costs $1,800 a month.
Both homes have a slightly feisty modernist appeal that matches the work of his firm, which recently completed the new Brooklyn Museum Café.
“I think that there’s a kind of standard thinking that once you get to a certain level in life, you have to buy,” said Mr. Yarinsky, who is 36. “But I haven’t found it was the right time.”
And he got a lucky break. He signed his first one-year lease in Bushwick eight years ago, when the owner was in the process of renovating the three-story stucco townhouse. This allowed Mr. Yarinsky to help choose the finishes of his top-floor unit, which includes terrazzo countertops, nice lacquer cabinets and simple, modern hardware. Portions of exposed brick were left on the walls after a discussion with the landlord, and he treated himself to a Jacuzzi tub, though he said he regrets it now. (“It’s so hard to clean.”)
At first, Mr. Yarinsky shared the two-bedroom apartment. A couple of years later, after his roommate moved out, he was tempted to knock down the wall between rooms to create a large space for entertaining. Instead, he cut out a large, blob-shaped hole in the wall “to keep it light and convertible if I needed to put it back.”
The rest of the renovation was driven by the selection and placement of objects. He custom-built the skinny dining table, arranged midcentury Folke Pålsson chairs around it and hung a Myrna pendant lamp by the Brooklyn-Seattle design studio Ladies and Gentlemen.
The living room’s furnishings include a daybed and a record cabinet made by Mr. Yarinsky and an Alvar Aalto Paimio armchair (Office of Tangible Space worked with the Alvar Aalto Foundation and Consulate General of Finland to dismantle the Kaufmann Conference Center, a rare American project by Aalto that is being moved from its home in a building across from the United Nations.)
“I have no plans to leave,” Mr. Yarinsky said of his place. “I think that I have a pretty OK setup where it’s sustainably priced and I feel I’m getting what I need.”
For some renters, a lack of ownership is no impediment to making a serious financial or emotional commitment.
When Stellah De Ville, a designer and artist, moved to Mexico City from Oaxaca 18 months ago, she poured her heart into a wreck of a building in the Roma Sur neighborhood, which she turned into a residence, ceramics studio and showroom.
Ms. De Ville, 52, an Australian who has lived in Brooklyn and Northern California, said she was lucky to find a landlord who did not insist that she have a guarantor for the lease, as is often the case with foreigners in Mexico. He also agreed to a five-year lease, charging 46,000 pesos (about $2,388) a month, with a 10 percent increase each year.
The three-bedroom house, the main part of which dates from 1933, is about 3,500 square feet and has a garden with a mango tree and an “exuberant banana palm.” (There is also a one-bedroom guest apartment.) The house had been used as a film production studio for a dozen years and lacked gas, hot water and a functioning kitchen.
Over 10 months, working with three successive teams of contractors, Ms. De Ville spent an estimated $60,000, or “what it would cost to renovate a New York bathroom,” she said. She estimates that she also contributed about $25,000 in unpaid labor. She restored basic functionality inside and out, adding bathroom fixtures, repairing stucco, fixing floors and installing a six-burner Italian range in the kitchen, along with custom-milled cabinet doors and fresh terrazzo. Throughout the house, she designed new tile and replicated old patterns. She made custom light fixtures. Everything was newly painted.
The owner agreed that Ms. De Ville could rent out the property for film shoots and events. That revenue, along with the sale of ceramics from her in-house gallery, offsets the cost of improvements.
And then there is the simple enjoyment of what she has.
“Why wouldn’t you make an investment so that your life is as rich as possible?” she said. “I know renters who have lived 20 years with a feature wall painted a color they can’t stand. Why would you do that?”
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