You make the boring white walls and rather ordinary apartment really beautiful and great with your aesthetic. Yay! Loving the texture of those paintings in the bathroom too! And I like how the small kitchen is...creative layout.

this apartment is beautiful. but it is not in the lower east side. it is in stuyvesant town.

@thekrecs: Back in the day, everything below 23rd on the east side was the LES. But over time, the labels do change. I used to live in an old building on 12th Street. I told people I lived in the East Village. My 65-year-old neighbor who was quite literally born in her apartment said she lived on the Lower East Side.

I like the idea of the TV bench in the living room! The bed seems so small, though...

@klt108: hm, that makes sense. it's funny, my parents lived in alphabet city when i was born, and my great grandparents lived in the tenements in the LES before my time, but having "moved back" there myself six months ago, i still have a lot to learn about my new/old neighborhood. thank you for the clarification!

anyway, more importantly: i love how much life has been breathed into this apartments. from what i've seen in person, the stuy town apartments have those nice floors and fantastic, clean bones, but without the instant charm or details of an apartment without major renovations, it takes some real ingenuity, a lot more editing, and a special touch to make an apartment like this feel homy. mission accomplished.

also — this could very well be part of the Grand Street residences on the LES, south of Delancey and near the East River.

Helll-llloooo, Brian!

Great artwork!

I like the way the old drafting table hosts a computer workstation. Clever idea!

You've created a wonderful space with a great mix of your two styles. I love it, and I'm SO envious of the Rauschenberg.

This is def in stuy town, and the apt is not small. It's a very good sized one bedroom with probably lots of closet space. nice job

Great art display! I like that you hung a piece next to the bend instead of the obvious spot above the bed, nice idea!

Love the view!!!

So elegant...! I love the bedroom, even the dog matches the style.

That is NOT small! Especially for LES standards. 780 sqft?! Are you kidding me?! I'm grateful for upgrading from 150 sq ft to 250 sq ft!!!!

*Love* the cocktail table. Where did you get it? "Italy" is a bit vague.

Stuyvesant town apartment buildings look just like Parkchester apartment buildings in the Bronx they are owned by the same people.

I almost didn't look at this, the first picture looked too spare and practical for my taste, but then I saw the artwork on the wall and saw many things I'd like to step up and see closer. Modern without the cold and boring, filled with personality and surprises. My favorite kind of dog, too.

Is this Stuy town?? It ooks awesome! Very rare to see real artwork (as in, not from ikea) in that apartment complex :)

Love the framed art work and photos!

I like the aesthetic and all the art too. The oyster-shells(?) piece; is that your own? Love it.

I'm also still learning about the 'hood too; live in the Grand Street co-ops myself. Think I recall there was just a NYTimes article this past weekend about all the art/galleries on the Lower East Side. Worth exploring.

lovely tour! Brian & Riccardo really have designed a beautiful space despite "rental white" restrictions.

Very lovely apartment, and I actually know where it is :)

I love the architecture in New York (I myself am from London originally). Is your apartment always so clean and tidy? I like it because - apart from the order - it's homely and demure. Also, you manage to use blue and grey a lot without forgetting to add color and gaiety with flowers and other decorative effects. If I were your dog, I'd be v. proud of my owners' pad. It's amazing to think you've been there just two months. Good on you both.

While neighborhood labels do change over the years, Stuy Town is most definitely not, nor ever really was, the Lower East Side. Historically, the uptown/downtown demarcation was made at 14th Street, not 23rd [read Gotham by Burrows and Wallace; Five Points by Anbinder; Low Life by Sante; etc.]. Stuy Town extends from 14th Street to 23rd Street and was built in 1947 in a neighborhood previously known as the Gas House District for the power plant and gas tanks that loomed over the mostly Irish and German immigrant families in the neighborhood. It was a tenement slum much like the Italian and Jewish Lower East Side. After the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, the bodies of the dead were taken to a makeshift morgue on the Gas House District's waterfront.

As for neighborhood lines today, check out the New York City Department of City Planning website. Stuy Town is not even in the same community district as the LES.

http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/html/neighbor/neighe.shtml

The drafting table is probably my favorite piece. And the entry table. Both are great against the more modern pieces. And the collection of art is inspiring.

So jealous of the view. And what a wonderful friendly looking pup!!!

Very nice and neat looking. I like the floors and I really like the couches they kinda remind of the furniture in the 60's which I love.Pretty dog.

I love the rug in the living room...where's that from?

modern, earthy and antique it certainly is.....love it! i do like the sofa in the living room...simple lines, not fussy - god it hate fussy...and i love the color against the white wall.

I've never considered Stuytown LES. I lived in the city 22 years and got off the subway at the First Avenue F train stop for fourteen years, so I know the two neighborhoods well. It's like calling Chinatown LES. Stuytown is different from the true LES, just like Chinatown is different from the LES, just like the Seaport area is different from the Wall Street area.

The true LES, as I consider it, is a neighborhood of former tenements and some small apartment buildings, some built as long ago as the early Nineteenth Century, and most being during the second half of the Nineteenth Century, or at the turn of the Twentieth Century. The housing, apart from the new condos, is old-fashioned row houses and the streets are narrow. Historically, it was poor neighborhood, and the row houses are not grand brownstones like you find in the Village, the UES, Harlem, or the great brownstone neighborhoods of Brooklyn.

Stuyvesant Town was an exercise in social engineering, where all the tenements were cleared away and neat, uniform low-rise brick apartments were built instead, I believe in the first half of the 20th Century. There were open, manicured lawns in place of the narrow streets of the LES. A single landlord controlled the entire property and enforced community standards. There are even fountains on the property. So Stuytown never experienced the true down-and-out status of the LES. It was always a bastion of the middle class.

There's a totally different feel between the old Lower East Side and Stuytown. Of course, the old Lower East Side is now gentrified, so you don't have the marked different feel there once was. But architecturally, the two neighborhoods couldn't be more different.

Having said all that for the benefit of people not familiar with NYC, I'd like to say that I considered this a beautiful, sophisticated apartment and I loved the art. My only question is: where do the toothbrushes go in the bathroom?

By the way: Lower East Side and East Village? What's the dif? As far as I know, it's one and the same. I think the East Village appellation began to be used by realtors looking to upgrade the locale. Same thing: Fort Greene and Clinton Hill.
Oldtimers call it Fort Greene; realtors call it Clinton Hill.

"White appliances" are your biggest embarrassment? Why? They brighten the space and look great with the white subway tiles. Please, don't be embarrassed just because you aren't able jump on the stainless steel bandwagon. That stuff is OK, but not for everyone. Find your own best solution!

Your sofa is just what I've been looking for, where did you get it?

units like this are not limited to stuytown; in nyc, there are thousands of these post-war white boxes w/ low ceilings & floorplans for which there is no good arrangement of furniture. stuytown (neither ev nor les, btw; see above) is special in its horrible history: the gastown tenements were razed before there ever was relocation compensation (as was penn sta, lincoln ctr/columbus circle, et. al.), the buildings were erected and owned by met life for years, and they were "restricted;" the "separate but equal" sister development is located at the end of the no. 3 line in harlem, and both imposed other rules that may not have been kosher (no unrelated cohabitants, no sublets, no a/c, etc.) but very much were enforced. this week, the present owners of stuytown, who upgraded the electric for a/c, just lost a lawsuit that charged market rate for vacant apartments, "restricting" by income this time.

decorating like this is not limited to stuytown, either; except for some very nice art & a commendable lack of clutter, there is nothing special in the furniture or arrangements of it (hence the posts about location, size, partners, the dog). was hoping for inspiration.

I also really like the rug. Is there any way to find out where it's from?

Nice place. I love the parquet floors and the kitchen. A lot of the art is really good, too.

Just one question--what is that red thing between the coffee table and the couch in the first shot? It caught my eye right away and I can't figure it out. Vacuum cleaner, maybe?

lovely, the sofa and the coffee table are perfect together

As someone who worked in real estate in Manhattan many years, there is a world of difference between Stuy Town and the LES, which begins at Houston and borders Chinatown. That is not to say one is better than another, but there were always incentives to move to Stuyvesant, because renters reflexively resisted it. They were poor slums in the 70s and the post-war apartments seem boring to people.

As for space, though, you can't beat it! Aaron, in an earlier comment, could be right, as well. The Grand St. residences are virtually identical.

The artwork really makes the place. It's a lovely home, and the dog is very sweet.

very nice! Im not a big fan of trinkets but your use of the little houses in the bathroom is brilliant! This would put a smile on anyone's face in the morning.

The art corner balanced by a sparse sofa corner is very smart. Great job in such a short time.

I love how unified the color scheme is: simple, yet powerful.