The more visits Blake Weeks made to Manhattan, the more he found he was \u201cfalling for the city.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
The couple normally split time between a house near Montgomery, Ala., where Mr. McAlpine founded his architecture and design firm, McAlpine<\/a>, and Atlanta, where Mr. Weeks, an artist<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n For a while, they rented a nondescript apartment near McAlpine\u2019s office in Nomad. \u201cIt was New York handsome generic,\u201d said Mr. McAlpine, 69, describing a standard white-box apartment with nice but boring finishes.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cBlake said \u2018Can\u2019t we have something old, with character?\u2019\u201d Mr. McAlpine said.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a wonderful building,\u201d Mr. McAlpine said. \u201cIt\u2019s got gargoyles, and who doesn\u2019t want to live in a New York building with gargoyles?\u201d<\/p>\n They loved the building\u2019s 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 No\u00ebl Coward.<\/p>\n 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. \u201cIt had beautiful ornate ceilings in the living and dining areas and a powerful fireplace in a Jacobean paneled style,\u201d Mr. McAlpine said.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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. \u201cIt turned the apartment into a sort of tuxedo, like I imagine a silent movie star would have worn,\u201d said Mr. Weeks, 42.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cWe do tend to go at things like a ship in a bottle,\u201d said Mr. McAlpine, who shared a design tip: \u201cIf the space is small, put giant furniture in it.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Having the sofas flanked by candles \u201cdoes theatricalize something that\u2019s already kind of headed that way,\u201d Mr. McAlpine said, adding that they hoped to make the whole room feel something like a cozy inglenook. \u201cBetween the tall back sofas, the paneled fireplace and the low ceiling, it\u2019s really got its arms around you.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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\u2019t always present to care for live plants.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cThe 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,\u201d Mr. Weeks said. \u201cWe wanted something that felt a little more real, and we wanted to know the people we live next to.\u201d<\/p>\n Gaining approval from the co-op board when they bought the apartment was also a uniquely New York experience.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was so hard to get in here,\u201d Mr. McAlpine said, recalling the invasive, drawn-out process of getting approved by the board. \u201cBut now that we\u2019re in, on the other side of the wall,\u201d he said, \u201cit\u2019s really sweet.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The more visits Blake Weeks made to Manhattan, the more he found he was \u201cfalling for the city.\u201d…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":307985,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[174,85210,116536,9,24,55,54,56,578,6672],"class_list":["post-307984","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-content-type-personal-profile","tag-home-repairs-and-improvements","tag-hotel-des-artistes","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-city-headlines","tag-new-york-city-news","tag-ny","tag-real-estate-and-housing-residential","tag-upper-west-side-manhattan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307984","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=307984"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307984\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/307985"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=307984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=307984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=307984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}