THIS 550-SQUARE-FOOT BROOKLYN HOME MAKES THE CASE FOR CONSTANT REARRANGING

In Lily Sullivan’s first five years in New York, she jumped between five different apartments around Brooklyn—the common renter’s tale. She always knew she would live in New York and work in magazines; after all, at the age of seven she self-published Vanity Bear, a publication about her Build-a-Bear collection. Lily finally made it to New York in 2016, after graduating college and landing a role on Domino magazine’s brand team. Today, she’s a brand consultant with a newsletter, “Love and Other Rugs,” which details stories about design and dating.

In 2020, while working as the head of brand at sexual wellness company Maude, Lily was living in an apartment in Williamsburg and found herself wanting to make very permanent changes, like retiling the bathroom, in a home she would ultimately leave behind. She recalls, “Everyone was sort of like, ‘Don’t alter and put money into a space that you don’t actually own. You are setting money on fire.’” That’s when a friend suggested she look into buying.

Lily never thought she could actually buy an apartment. She says, “After my mother and then my grandmother passed away, there was a little bit of money that came my way—it was an interesting time, and the interest rates were low.” She reminisces on her experience touring five apartments with “the world’s greatest real-estate agent, Manek,” who she describes as a gorgeous former professional squash player from India who held her hand throughout the whole process.

At the third apartment tour in Prospect Heights, Lily got in the elevator with a current resident who told her she had lived in the building for 25 years. “There was such a warmth and community that I thought, This is a cool environment, and I’m leaving Williamsburg, which is loud, and it was a different era of my life,” Lily clarifies, “Not that I was ready to settle down, but I wanted a little bit of stillness and distance in a space that was really mine.” She put in an offer two days later and moved in two months after that, in July 2021. Luckily for her, too, the former owners had just updated the kitchen and bathroom without taking away any of the charm or parquet floors.

By New York State laws, the 550-square-foot apartment is technically considered a studio because the bedroom doesn’t have windows and was labeled as an office on the floor plan. Lily admits, “The evolution of the space has been wild. I bought it with the pretense of, ‘Oh, I’m going to blow out a wall. I’m going to open the floor plan. I’m going to turn this little bedroom into a dining room. And I’m going to build a glass wall that divides the living room in half and turn that into a bedroom.’” She adds, “This is a $40,000 renovation project. I just wanted an apartment. I had no business and no budget to do that.”

But for the first year in the space, Lily lived with her bed in the 20-foot-by-14-foot living room with every intention in the world of making her renovation dreams a reality and testing out to see what it’d feel like. Meanwhile in the spare room, boxes of clothes filled the room and it functioned as a storage unit. Eventually her dream started to feel more like she was living in a hotel suite.

On the morning of her birthday, Lily decided she needed a change. At 8 a.m., alone in her home, she dragged her queen mattress into her then storage closet (almost throwing out her back) and set up her main space to become her living and dining room. Letting go of her gut reno pipe dream allowed Lily the ability to be playful with her living space, rearranging the furniture almost more times than she can count. She says, “The couch has been on every single wall in that room, and there’s been four different couches—it’s the thing I’m never 100% sure of.” Another thing about the couch is that it is gray. “I’m a notorious hater of gray couches, but it’s comfortable and works in this space because it’s not jumping out at you when there are so many other eye candy moments,” Lily admits, though she explains that the Blu Dot couch, purchased on Kaiyo, was listed as oatmeal-colored.

Those eye candy moments she refers to include her collection of art, objects, and gifts that continue to tell their own stories throughout each rendition of her living space. Most of her art belonged to or was made by her mother. Knickknacks and books on the wall-mounted shelves behind her couch serve as mementos of happy memories and travels. Above her floor-length mirror hangs a framed pair of shorts her mother made in the ’70s, next to it sits a dark wood chair by a French designer, which Lily jokes is “the man of the house.”

In the dining area, a big table to gather her friends around was crucial for all of Lily’s dinner parties. When she saw a gray rectangular table from Lichen, she knew it’d be in her life forever. Lily already had a rare set of three red Bertoia chairs that had belonged to her mother and, separately, she fell in love with a set of red cane chairs at Renewfinds on their opening weekend. “I saw these chairs stacked and I thought, I need those,” Lily says. She looked in her bank account, saw a random deposit, realized it was from the US government, and deemed the seats her stimulus check chairs. In hindsight, Lily says it was a bit reckless, but she’s obsessed with them and “it was sort of a coincidence that they look so good with the table and the other chairs.” Most recently she’s added a chrome light fixture above the table that she stumbled upon on Facebook Marketplace.

As someone with a lot of colorful art, Lily’s walls are mostly white. Except for two places (so far). The built-in shelves in the entryway were among the selling points for Lily, and to add some fun to the space she painted them a light mauve color called Jawbreaker, from her close friend Natalie’s paint brand, Backdrop. In her storage unit turned bedroom, she decided to do something dramatic. Given that the room has no windows, she went all in on the cave feeling, coating her walls in a dark eggplant also from Backdrop. The Hem rug under her bed is almost the same color as the walls, and together they make the room feel like “a meditative box” where Lily claims she gets the best sleep of her life. When it comes to paint, she’s adopted the same mentality as she did with her layout: It doesn’t need to be permanent, which she acknowledges is where anxiety builds for a lot of people around painting their own walls anything other than a neutral.

But for the record, all of Lily’s furniture rearranging is less about being unsure of her space and more about the excitement in the impermanence of it all. The ability to wake up one morning, think to herself, ‘Maybe the couch would look better over there,’ enlist a friend to help, and try it out for a few days. She says, “I joke that I just need a boyfriend so I can have someone to carry the other side of the couch, but in the meantime I will just have my friends over for a wine night and then make them move furniture around.”