By Design takes a closer look at the world of design, in moments big and small.
In January 2024, while the Canadian playwright and author Jordan Tannahill and the American actor Brandon Flynn were in Ottawa caring for Tannahill’s sick mother, Flynn was scrolling through some New York listings. Upon spotting a 750-square-foot prewar apartment in the East Village, the couple sent their real estate agent to investigate. He called back to warn them that it wouldn’t stay on the market long. Flynn, who had been renting a place in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, decided to drive 11 hours in a snowstorm to visit the two-bedroom property himself. The pair had a few reservations — the closets were small, the bathroom was outdated — but made an offer anyway. Flynn, 31, who recently played Marlon Brando Off Broadway in “Kowalski,” liked that the top-floor residence was at least big enough for dinner parties, and Tannahill, 36, whose 2021 novel, “The Listeners,” was adapted earlier this year into a BBC series starring Rebecca Hall, loved what he calls the neighborhood’s “extraordinary punk and queer history.”
For the renovations, they chose Noam Dvir, 42, and Daniel Rauchwerger, 37, of the New York-based design studio Bond. A friend had introduced the new homeowners to the firm’s residential projects on Fire Island; like Horace Gifford, the midcentury architect who designed some 60 homes on the island, Dvir and Rauchwerger, who are married, tend to incorporate wood paneling and glass to create serene spaces — with only the occasional burst of color in the form of tiles or Formica counters — that feel quietly seductive. The architects like to ask new clients to supply a handful of reference images; Flynn sent close to 250 pictures of maximalist rooms. “Brandon was like, ‘Oh, thank God you asked,’ and then forwarded the links to all these things he’d been saving for months,” Rauchwerger says.
T’s Design Issue
Inside six very different family residences.
- Carl and Karin Larsson’s exuberant, art-filled houses in Sweden.
- An art dealer’s strangely familiar Venetian apartment.
- A mountain compound in Brazil where a big family found a way to live together and apart.
- Is it architecture or is it art? A Parisian couple celebrate the in-between.
- A family’s reimagined beach house in the Philippines.
- Brandon Flynn and Jordan Tannahill’s cinematic East Village apartment.
“I was in love [with the apartment], but I also had a vision for how things could change,” says Flynn, who’d initially wanted to cover every wall with brightly patterned wallpaper. Although they ended up incorporating Flynn’s preferred color scheme — shades of blue and green appear in most rooms — the group agreed on a different style: earthy minimalism, with plywood and red oak to warm up the interiors.