The interior of Elizabeth Seacord and Adam Feldman’s Upper West Side Manhattan apartment in The Belnord (the same opulent, early-20th-century building where Selena Gomez and two elder statesmen of comedy solve crimes in the Hulu show Only Murders in the Building) is shambolic in a way that feels comfortable, bohemian, and, above all, authentic to the family that lives there.

Books, papers, and family photos cover every surface. “That’s my grandmother,” Liz says of an oil painting of an eight-year-old girl that hangs in the living room. “She got kicked out of school for beating up another little girl who was being mean.” A stuffed dog named Gomez (a nod to The Addams Family, not the actor), an effigy for a dearly departed pet, sits sentinel on a chair overlooking Broadway. It’s all part of a setting that is a bit of a unicorn—the kind of place you only dream about making your own. “I was really lucky,” Liz says. “I married a guy named Adam Feldman,” who inherited it from his mother.

The fates are familiar to Liz—“your basic astrologer–amateur photographer,” she says—and luck played a role in how the recent renovation came to be. Talitha Liu and Lexi Tsien of New York design studio Soft-Firm came to Liz by way of happenstance: A conversation Tsien had on a flight with the woman sitting next to her—one of Liz’s friends—led the pair to her apartment.

e resident Elizabeth Seacord (pictured with her husband, Adam Feldman) cringes remembering her neighbors gutting their historic units. “It’s like deforestation,” she says." layout="" credit="Add credit" photoUserId=""/>

“The kitchen is the heart. It pumps all the blood into the family and the rest of our apartment.”
–Elizabeth Seacord, resident

Liz wanted to renovate her kitchen and what had originally been a maid’s room but was now used for storage, but she didn’t want to re-create the traditional look of the Belnord apartments and sought something more distinctive.

Executing a design for the 525-square-foot space that felt modern without seeming out of place in a prewar apartment required flexibility. A dramatic arch in the middle of the kitchen was a particular challenge, but the designers rebuilt it, smoothing it out and twisting one of its walls, slightly opening up the space. Just behind the kitchen, the renovated maid’s room is done in a fleshy, not-quite-millennial pink and a green the color of Castelvetrano olives. The pink echoes the shade that was previously on the room’s walls and the pastel hues in the kitchen. Entering the space before the renovation “was like walking into the storage room of a museum,” says Liu—full of photos and a large collection of masks picked up on Liz’s travels or created by her and the couple’s children, Sasha and Iris, when they were young.

When I visited the apartment, the masks had made way for something more current: a collection of otherworldly ceramic sculptures created by Sasha, now grown and an exhibiting artist, arranged on new custom shelving that curves around the perimeter with green and pink backgrounds.

“Their whole life is classic, delightfully bohemian Upper West Side. It’s authentic.”
–Talitha Liu, designer

The couple left the rest of their apartment unchanged, and stumbling upon the renovations as you poke through the halls is a bit of a surprise. “I really think it’s cool to kind of wander back and have this totally different corner,” says Liz. The two spaces are modern without feeling out of place with the rest of the home’s eccentric charm, and the home is now a true reflection of the couple—colorful but calm, a little eclectic, a tiny bit bohemian, with a hint of magic.

Project Credits:

Interior Design: Soft-Firm / @soft__firm

Architect of Record: David Jimenez, RA

Builder: Building Code Partners

Parlor Cabinetry: New York Custom Interior Millwork / @nycinteriormillwork

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