Inside the 900-Square-Foot Manhattan Duplex of a Budding Collector

All products featured on Architectural Digest are independently selected by Architectural Digest editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, Condé Nast may earn an affiliate commission.

When Jordan Williams purchased his diamond-in-the-rough Greenwich Village apartment, a 900-square-foot one-bedroom duplex with a massive terrace in Manhattan, his mother gave him some helpful advice: hire an interior designer. “It was a blank canvas, the outdoor space was just totally abandoned, and she said, ‘You don’t understand the challenges that you have,’” Williams remembers. “She was right.”

Williams began scrolling through the AD PRO Directory in search of someone to reimagine his home. “Alvin [Wayne]’s work really stood out,” Williams says. “I found it to be really inventive for its use of color and texture. And it’s bold. I have collected art and old objects over time, so I thought that his approach gelled with the things that I already had and the things I was interested in.”

Wayne was immediately on board. He was impressed by Williams’s belongings, like a graphic, sewn-canvas Ethan Cook piece and a vintage Giuseppe Rivadossi coffee table, and he knew exactly how to make them sing. “He wanted it to feel designed, but still comfortable; he wanted it to be colorful, but not crazy,” Wayne recalls. “I knew I could push it a little bit and have fun with it. And I knew he would really appreciate the pieces that I wanted to pair with what he already owned.”

In the entryway, Wayne made a splash with a chain link-like Lee Jofa x Kelly Wearstler wallpaper in a slew of warm neutral tones, from pale peach to rich rust to slate gray. He then painted the front door a milk chocolate hue and laid down an amorphous Mush rug in burgundy, beige, and pistachio. “I always feel like you need a little statement moment,” he says. “And I wanted to have a clear delineation of the spaces. It also introduces colors that I pulled out throughout the entire home.”

The rest of the unit, including the ceilings, is swathed in creamy white Venetian plaster for a sense of character. “I wanted the movement of the plaster,” explains Wayne. “I knew the way that light came into the apartment would reflect beautifully off of it. We didn’t need a bold color or more wallpaper—the plaster technique would give us all the depth that we needed so it wouldn’t feel like a big white box.”

The ethereal wall finish is the ideal backdrop for Williams’s aforementioned Ethan Cook work, which hangs above a geometric Tufenkian Zigzaggery rug, a custom Mark Grattan walnut-and-glass coffee table, and a low-slung Amura Lapis sofa with rounded edges and midnight blue velvet upholstery. “Every item feels like a piece of the puzzle,” describes Wayne. “It’s a lot of graphic pieces, but they don’t compete with each other. They complement each other.”

In the adjacent dining area, Wayne created a groovy, retro vibe with a medley of Italian gems from the 1960s and ’70s. A green Cipollino marble table is surrounded by a set of chrome-and-leather Guido Faleschini Tucroma chairs and sits beneath a Taraxacum cocoon pendant by Achille & Pier Giacomo Castiglioni for Flos. “We went full-on vintage,” he says. “I didn’t want to do anything new.”

The kitchen, on the other hand, was updated with a sleek, contemporary look before Williams moved in. He managed to add his personality to the compact space by displaying a 1950s Japanese abacus and squeezing in a 300-bottle cherrywood wine cellar. Meanwhile, Wayne sourced a blackened brass flush mount from CB2 and a multicolored painting by Mana Sazegara, an artist he met at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair last spring.

Wayne upgraded the original staircase with a Space Age Poul Henningsen PH5 pendant and an oversized black-and-ivory painting by Johnny Abrahams, an artist Williams has long admired. “In 2019, I had the chance to buy a similar piece, but I didn’t think it was right for my place [at the time],” he shares. “That was a huge mistake. But Alvin and I were out to dinner, and after a couple glasses of wine, he said, ‘I’ll just send a DM to the artist.’ He wrote back that there was a piece in the basement of the Jack Hanley Gallery in Tribeca. We went there the next day.”

Williams’s bedroom is split into three zones: sleeping, working, and relaxing. A copper Jake Arnold for Lulu and Georgia rug defines the sleep section, where a chunky wooden platform bed from Anthropologie is dressed in maroon sheets and a patterned Nickey Kehoe quilt. “I wanted it to feel cozy when you walked in,” says Wayne. “I wanted you to want to jump into the bed, but not feel overly done.”

Both the desk and the office chair in the work-from-home setup are vintage Eames finds, as is the lounge chair in the corner vignette dedicated to sipping coffee and reading novels. The iconic midcentury seat, which Williams already owned, is coupled with a monolithic Giuseppe Rivadossi coffee table that he bought in upstate New York. “It’s definitely unconventional to have a single chair and a giant coffee table with decorative pieces on it,” admits Williams. “We talked about putting a couch there, but this just felt more like me.”

Beyond the bedroom, Williams’s terrace overlooks the Manhattan skyline. Wayne maximized the unusually large outdoor space by curating distinct dining and lounging areas, all with CB2 teak furniture and neutral Lulu and Georgia rugs. “We interjected a lot of color inside the home, so I wanted it to be all about the views outside,” he explains. “I wanted to make you feel like you weren’t in the center of New York City.” That’s the power of working with an interior designer.

Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest

More Great Stories From AD

• Sign up for our daily newsletter to get the best of design in your inbox.

• Jackie Kennedy at Home: Inside the Icon’s Domestic Life

• The Best Hotels Around the World, According to AD Editors

• Looking Back at President Jimmy Carter’s White House