Fabian & David’s Sleek Remodeled Rental

Name: Fabian & David
Location: New Haven, Connecticut

We are Fabian from Germany and David from the United States, two doctoral students at Yale University, and we turned our student rental into a modern, minimalist apartment.

Both of us work in the social sciences but also have a casual interest in architecture and interior design. We became friends during the first year of grad school and quickly realized that our aesthetic ideals are closely aligned — so we decided to become roommates and take on a remodel during our off-time.

The apartment is on the second floor of a Greek Revival building near the campus of Yale University. It is comprised of two bedrooms, one living room, one dining room (originally another bedroom), a spacious kitchen with adjacent pantry, and one bathroom. We made a deal with the landlords to renovate the apartment if they supported the work financially, allowing us to pull off the renovation within the financial constraints of a graduate student budget. We spent more than a year reconstructing and painting walls, laying floors and wall tiles, replacing hardware, wiring switches and outlets, replacing faucets, and more. We both had little to no experience with this kind of work and severely underestimated the scope of the project, but we learned a great deal on the job.

In our design choices, we tried to combine a clean and masculine minimalism with soft, organic elements, using a very simple palette of mainly blacks, whites, grays, and browns. Pooling our resources, we also managed to score some beautiful vintage design pieces, including original Bertoia and Eames chairs, a Nelson lamp, and a Franco Albini ottoman. In addition, we built quite a few items ourselves, including the chandeliers in the dining room and corridor, the reclaimed-wood dining table, the pipe shelves in the pantry, and a wraparound bar in the kitchen.

Thanks, Fabian & David!

• Interested in sharing your home with Apartment Therapy? Contact the editors through our House Tour & House Call Submission Form.