6 min read
When most young New Yorkers move into their first college apartment, they don’t typically put nearly as much effort into making it feel like home as actress and Columbia University student Amelie Zilber has. While her campus may be nearly 100 blocks uptown, the Los Angeles transplant—who can be seen starring in the movie Slanted, out now—opted for a 100-year-old apartment building downtown after falling in love with the charm of both the neighborhood and her 900-square-foot home. Luckily, her personal style aligned with the pre-existing architectural elements of the early 20th-century building she calls home.
That said, she didn’t just move in, arrange some furniture, hang some art, and call it a day. “It certainly was not a gut renovation, but I definitely made some big changes,” she says of her makeover, which included painting, installing wallpaper, and even swapping out the kitchen floor. Because she’s a tenant rather than an owner, she made sure that any changes she made are easy to revert to their original state when she decides to leave.
For her first home outside the one she grew up in, Zilber did pretty well for herself. “Everything was new to me. Before this, I had only ever lived in my childhood home, so this was my first real experience decorating a space from scratch,” Zilber explains. One strategy that worked for her was her willingness to splurge on pieces she loves and will keep for years. “I’d always rather spend more on something that makes me happy every time I look at it, functions well, and makes the space feel like home,” she adds.
I love anything romantic, old-fashioned, and slightly grandmotherly.
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One of the most prominent pieces in Zilber’s Parisian-style living room is a large-scale painting she made on a piece of scrap fabric. “I had just ended a situationship, and I knew that the only way to deal with my feelings was to paint,” she admits.
The style of the apartment had to match her personal aesthetic, so when she began her apartment search, Zilber considered only pre-war buildings that, unlike many new residential towers, boast a certain charm. This spot downtown, built in 1900, came with almost everything Zilber wanted. The one exception? A fireplace, so she basically installed one herself (though not a functional one). “This was wildly expensive, and in hindsight, I wish I had gotten something that offered storage too,” Zilber admits. “But I love the way it looks, even if it serves almost no purpose beyond aesthetics.”
Another pricey find Zilber doesn’t regret is the set of vintage stools she found on 1stDibs. With so much white in the living room, she wanted to incorporate a few items that introduced dimension and texture, so she set out to find something decorative that wasn’t just an accessory. The stools, upholstered in a 1940s-style tiger print, were an obvious solution. “They’re very old, though, so no one is really allowed to sit on them,” she jokes.
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In Zilber’s living room, a gallery wall takes center stage. After spending quite a bit of time getting it right, she added the vintage table and a woven storage basket that conceals her WiFi router.
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“The Madeline book was a gift from my childhood friend, Audrey,” Zilber says. “The story meant a lot to us growing up, and she gave it to me so I could someday have my own copy to pass down to a future daughter, which I thought was very sweet.”
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As cute as this dollhouse-sized dresser may be, Zilber didn’t order it thinking it would be so small. “I bought this chest of drawers on eBay and, you guessed it, did not check the dimensions,” she explains. “The photos made it look life-size and, for what I thought was a suspiciously good price, I bought it immediately.”
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Zilber designed this nook in her entryway around the antique tapestry that her mother bought in France several decades earlier. “I bought the dresser first, then layered in the rest,” she notes.
Aside from the fireplace and the stools, the most eye-catching element in her living space is easily the massive canvas depicting two abstract silhouettes. No, it’s not from a Paris flea market or a gallery in Chelsea; it’s a piece Zilber painted herself in the midst of a breakup. “I painted this on a piece of excess cloth I had lying around—I think it might have been a curtain I meant to return.”
Luckily, her artistic inclinations lean toward the Sixth Arrondissement, just like the rest of her space. She avoided anything that felt too gimmicky to make sure her home always felt timeless and classic, but it does have the French factor that anyone with an affinity for style attempts to capture. In Zilber’s case, she succeeded.
I’m not super extravagant in most areas of my life, but with furniture and art, I absolutely am.
Perhaps the room where Zilber’s Francophile tendencies are most on display is the kitchen, where a black-and-white checkerboard faux tile takes center stage. “With my mom’s help, we added peel-and-stick wallpaper and floor tiles,” she notes. It’s a good thing Zilber doesn’t consider herself a particularly skilled cook because, as she says, “with no room for a dining table, I usually eat sitting on my kitchen floor, which sounds bleak but is oddly charming in practice.”
Few people enlist a professional interior designer for a rental property, and while Zilber is no exception, she deferred to her mother’s input in more than one room. “She basically spent a weekend redesigning my kitchen,” Zilber notes. “She sourced and added most of the decor, since she’s incredibly good at interiors. I hope I inherited that bug from her.”
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Zilber poses beside a console table in her entryway. All of the drawings and paintings on her gallery wall are pieces she found at flea markets.
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What the kitchen lacks in size, it makes up for in French-inspired charm.
One skill that’s definitely well within Zilber’s wheelhouse is her ability to curate decor: Nearly every surface features a few unique pieces that the average shopper would definitely not be able to pick up at their closest mass-market retailer. Almost everything—a Tiffany Blue-colored rotary phone, a vintage French vocabulary book, or a dollhouse-sized mahogany dresser, to name a few items—is specialized and, in some cases, one of a kind. Zilber adds, “When I’m styling a surface, I usually care most about variation: different heights, textures, materials, and a balance between formal and odd.”
That balance is what makes Zilber’s home feel collected rather than over-styled. What’s more, she doesn’t buy anything specifically for one desk, wall, or nightstand. Rather, she buys things she loves when she happens upon them and, eventually, finds a place for them until she is happy with the curation of objects across her surfaces. “A lot of it takes time, and I move things around constantly,” she notes.
I was wildly indecisive about what I wanted, which is, unfortunately, very on brand for me.
A lot of it is vintage from a range of outposts, including flea markets and Etsy. She also happens to have nearly as much wall art as she does objects on the surfaces. “I’ve collected art from flea markets for years, and one morning I just started hanging things.” It’s a useful strategy considering most of the walls in her home, like most rentals in New York City, are white. The art, like much of the decor, pumps some life and charisma into Zilber’s home.
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The rotary phone, which rests atop the glossy surface of a vintage 1stDibs table, has not yet been connected. “I like the idea that it might one day ring,” Zilber says.
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So as not to overpower the tapestry above it, the decor on the black-painted case piece is subtle. The tray, a flea market find, is the perfect item to house both a collection of restaurant matchbooks and the Elsa Peretti vase Zilber bought at auction.
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Any pro collector knows that an array of old and new is what makes a collection worthwhile. Zilber’s books range from secondhand flea market tomes to newer editions of classics by Edith Wharton.
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One of Zilber’s favorite purchases is this set of vintage ottomans from 1stDibs. They’re so old and delicate that she asks anyone who visits her home to avoid sitting on them.
One room that, even with plenty of decor, is a bit quieter and more serene than the others is Zilber’s bedroom, where the king-size bed is quite literally king. “I actually bought the bed first, which was not my wisest move,” she admits. “I should have bought a queen, but I was impatient to wait for it, so I ended up with a king and no room for matching nightstands.” That said, she does have room for plenty of charming pieces, some of which are from surprising places.
The drapes and pendant light are both Amazon finds, while the quilt draped across the foot of the bed is from Zilber’s childhood home. The wallpaper, though, is what ties the room together seamlessly. “The wallpaper came very quickly after the bed because I knew I wanted toile. I love toile,” Zilber says. “I wanted my bedroom to feel as sleepy-girl-princess as possible.”
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While the king-size bed, which takes up most of the room, was her first purchase. Zilber’s love of toile is the centerpiece of the room.
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Kippy, Zilber’s five-year-old dachshund, is happy at home.
Zilber, though a self-proclaimed impulse-buyer, loves her home and has no plans to leave so soon after moving in. Still, she’s the first to admit that, while she spent quite a bit of time and money on it, it’s not perfect—at least not yet.
“Decorating my first apartment taught me that, in the future, I need to be a little more cohesive and a little less impulsive,” Zilber says. “I love my apartment, but if I were starting over, there are definitely things I’d do differently.” All of that said, the look and feel of her home achieved her aesthetic goal: French, classic, lived-in.
I wanted to make this space feel as Parisian as possible, with reason and rental constraints in mind.
Any designer would likely say that they also suffer from impulsive shopping here and there, making Zilber’s occasional inability to slow-decorate a non-issue, especially because the things that matter most to her are the things she took her time to find. “I have this terrible combination of spontaneity, impatience, and decision paralysis, so I would spend months not deciding on something, then suddenly have a complete blackout and impulse-buy something I certainly should have slept on.” However, the things she loves most—the pieces she brought from her childhood home, the things her mother had given her, and the vintage discoveries she spotted online and in the wild—are the ones she said yes to slowly.
As is typically the case, making something look effortless often requires a lot of effort. Zilber has a very specific sense of style—“a mix of British cottage, French traditional, and maybe a bit Victorian,” she says—and getting it right was hardly easy. After more than two years of living here, though, she finally created the space of her dreams.
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Zilber, in her living room, standing beside an emotionally charged piece she painted on a piece of leftover fabric.