On seeing this apartment for the first time, Athena told Victor, “It felt like Gotham City, not Manhattan.” They made an offer later that day. Their new place, a full floor in an august Tribeca building dating to the early 1900s, was originally the executive suite of the Borden condensed milk company, its prestige distilled in herringbone floors, 13-foot ceilings, and oak-paneled walls the color of chocolate syrup. After a residential conversion in the 1980s, it was acquired by the charismatic French architect Thierry Despont, whose historically agile public projects—freshening up the Statue of Liberty, renovating the Ritz Paris—bookended the au courant interiors he designed for Kelly and Calvin Klein, Oscar de la Renta, Bill Gates, and others. His apartment was a sepia-toned folly, with kitchen stools from a 1930s Italian motor yacht and a gridded-brass backsplash styled after the grill of a vintage Bugatti roadster.
Absent Despont’s glamorous accoutrements, though, the Borden corporate blueprint resurfaced like a milk mustache. The hallways had bowling lane proportions, the bathrooms were tiny. Calderone debated bleaching the dark woodwork that had incensed her EyeSwoon posse from the get-go (“Why does it feel a bit like Joan Crawford’s home circa the ’30s in Mommie Dearest?” one commenter posted), but after a trip to Vienna and Adolf Loos’s faultlessly pint-size American Bar there, she decided to embrace the darkness and stop worrying about tiny rooms. “I ended up finding the Brownstone Boys on Instagram, who refinished the woodwork beautifully at not that high a price,” she says. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”