The more visits Blake Weeks made to Manhattan, the more he found he was “falling for the city.” So a couple of years ago, he and his partner, Bobby McAlpine, decided it was time to buy a New York home that felt like them.
The couple normally split time between a house near Montgomery, Ala., where Mr. McAlpine founded his architecture and design firm, McAlpine, and Atlanta, where Mr. Weeks, an artist who works with natural materials and found objects, has his studio. But during monthly visits to New York, where McAlpine has another office, they were increasingly tempted to extend their stays.
For a while, they rented a nondescript apartment near McAlpine’s office in Nomad. “It was New York handsome generic,” said Mr. McAlpine, 69, describing a standard white-box apartment with nice but boring finishes.
For an architect who spends his days helping clients conceive their dream homes and an artist who produces otherworldly sculptures, however, it seemed a little tame.
“Blake said ‘Can’t we have something old, with character?’” Mr. McAlpine said.
When they saw a listing for a two-bedroom duplex in the Hotel des Artistes, a co-op on the Upper West Side completed in 1917, it looked ideal.
“It’s a wonderful building,” Mr. McAlpine said. “It’s got gargoyles, and who doesn’t want to live in a New York building with gargoyles?”
They loved the building’s old cage elevators, which are still manually controlled by elevator operators, and its long list of creative past residents, including Norman Rockwell, Rudolph Valentino and Noël Coward.
The apartment itself had previously been owned by the artist LeRoy Neiman, who died in 2012, and many of its original details appeared to be intact. “It had beautiful ornate ceilings in the living and dining areas and a powerful fireplace in a Jacobean paneled style,” Mr. McAlpine said.
They bought it in January 2025 for just under $3.5 million, planning to undertake a relatively minor renovation to freshen it up. They replaced wood floors in the bathrooms with white marble, installed new air-conditioning units in place of ones that looked like they were about to fail, and added wood blinds that pick up on the wood finish of the paneling around the fireplace.
They also had nearly every surface, including walls, ceilings, floors and cabinetry, coated in one of two Farrow & Ball paint colors: Pointing white or Pitch Black. “It turned the apartment into a sort of tuxedo, like I imagine a silent movie star would have worn,” said Mr. Weeks, 42.
The work took about three months, and cost roughly $200,000. Then Mr. McAlpine and Mr. Weeks stuffed the apartment full of furniture and art.
“We do tend to go at things like a ship in a bottle,” said Mr. McAlpine, who shared a design tip: “If the space is small, put giant furniture in it.”
For the compact living room, for instance, the couple chose a pair of matching sofas with high backs from Saladino and an oversized contemporary wingback chair from DeMuro Das. Behind the sofas, they added custom stands holding pillar candles.
Having the sofas flanked by candles “does theatricalize something that’s already kind of headed that way,” Mr. McAlpine said, adding that they hoped to make the whole room feel something like a cozy inglenook. “Between the tall back sofas, the paneled fireplace and the low ceiling, it’s really got its arms around you.”
They paired furniture upholstered in white fabric with weathered wood antiques, including apothecary cabinets with roll-front doors, a trestle table in the dining room and timeworn benches in the primary bedroom.
They also filled the rooms with art. A majority of the pieces are works by Mr. Weeks. A sculpture made from bones, abalone and ceramic beads hangs on the wall. Other pieces are displayed in glass cases, including a face made from antique beads and a serpent composed of feathers, seed pearls and moonstone. There are framed sketches of family dogs by Mr. Weeks’s sister, Sydney Weeks, an artist who also lives in New York. Finally, the couple added touches of green with preserved bonsai trees, since they aren’t always present to care for live plants.
The apartment now feels like a true home, they said, not just a glorified hotel room, which has enhanced their experience of living in New York.
“The place we were renting before, everyone was in such a hurry, and nobody was interested in anyone else in the elevator. It was just transient,” Mr. Weeks said. “We wanted something that felt a little more real, and we wanted to know the people we live next to.”
Gaining approval from the co-op board when they bought the apartment was also a uniquely New York experience.
“It was so hard to get in here,” Mr. McAlpine said, recalling the invasive, drawn-out process of getting approved by the board. “But now that we’re in, on the other side of the wall,” he said, “it’s really sweet.”