Meta product designer Mikei Huang spends most of his days immersed in a headset, building new worlds in the Metaverse. So, when it came to buying his first home in New York’s Bushwick neighborhood, he relished the challenge to map out its interiors, room by room and wall by wall. Mikei shares the two-bedroom, 745-square-foot space with his partner and his dog, Shabu Shabu, a Shiba Inu mix who likes to spend his days sunbathing on the high-pile rugs around the place.

When he was looking to move on from his previous Jersey City rental, Mikei zeroed in on the brutalist details anchoring this airy home. “I was immediately attracted to this place because of the concrete ceiling in the living room,” he says. “There were also some wall details and columns with exposed concrete that made me go, ‘Oh, this is really cool and I can build from this.’ It was an interesting canvas to start with.”

On move-in day, that canvas only came with a kitchen island and some closet spaces. So, over the last year that he’s occupied the home, Mikei—who studied communication and fine arts at Parsons School of Design—has been steadily adding in brushstrokes of color via the furnishings, which are an assortment of new pieces from brands like HAY and Dusen Dusen plus some key vintage finds sourced on Facebook Marketplace and at local stores.

To emphasize the home’s exposed concrete details, he brought in a dining table made of the same material and some industrial steel and brushed aluminum pieces. Meanwhile, he dialed up the saturation on the white-walled space with vibrant accents—from the gallery of cheery tchotchkes in the living room to the explosion of stripes in the home office that the couple converted from a second bedroom.

The open-concept apartment, which Mikei has blocked out by colors, also gives each space its own energy. He can screen a Netflix show in the purple dining area one moment, or amble over to the green-toned living area to curl up on the couch facing the wall-length mirrors there. “When the sunlight hits, the place feels magical with light bouncing off the mirrored surface into every corner in the apartment.”

Where did you cultivate your eye for design and interiors, and how did the vision for your home come together?

I've always loved building spaces—I started with creating virtual reality spaces for work, and now that passion bleeds into actual physical reality where I’m starting to construct spaces. (Well, not from scratch because I’m not an architect, but it feels like a similar process.) When you’re building 3D models, you start with some primitive shapes, and you can see that in the background of my living room, a lot of the silhouettes of the objects are all very basic geometric shapes. I also love color mixing. Before going into product design, I also had a background in communications and fine arts. So being a painter in my past life as a student, I still love mixing colors and contrast. I also love building an entire palette from one room to the other where they all complement each other, but slightly differently.

What was the biggest change to the space beyond minor cosmetic upgrades and furnishings?

We installed wall mirrors to reflect more light. They’re acrylic mirrors and my partner sourced them from factories in New Jersey where they make them for RVs and ships. Whereas actual mirrors are heavy and can shatter and break, these ones are much more lightweight. They didn’t require an additional structure, but we did hire some contractors to put a specialized glue on the back to stick them onto the wall. The ceilings in here are, like, 10 feet and three inches, so really, really tall. When we ordered these 10-foot acrylic mirrors, we tried to put them up ourselves with tape, which ended up being impossible to do.

How did you plan out your open-concept space?

The living room area is a large, L-shaped space, which I divided into pockets (the dining, the living, and the reading areas) using separate color palettes and lighting for each space. The dining area is purple-forward, while the living area and reading nook draw on green tones.

What’s your favorite spot in the apartment and why?

My favorite spot is for sure the reading nook in the living room. I love grabbing a book to read and stay cozy in the armchair. The reading nook has a great vantage point overlooking the entire living room and also into the balcony outside. A fun fact is that the books displayed in the reading nook are all unreadable as a joke (to add some humor in the space). The HAY and Dieter Rams books are still wrapped in plastic, and the one displayed in the center on the end table is from Dowel Jones—it’s a piece of oak wood wrapped in a pink linen hardcover. It’s also my dog’s favorite spot; he likes to snooze on the Mush rug.

What has been your most exciting vintage find for the space so far, and why?

The Memphis dining chairs from Betsu Studio. I was browsing vintage finds on Etsy at night, and saw these chairs listed. Before anyone else could snag them, the very next morning I was on my way driving to Philly with my partner in our car to pick up those chairs in person. They came in really good condition, and the casters are such a great addition—they make living in a small space like this easy, because I can roll the chairs around the apartment.

Do you entertain a lot here?

We have a bunch of parties here with friends. Most of the time it’s at the dining table, where we have hot pot parties. On the back wall is a Samsung Frame TV, and I actually installed the auto-rotating accessories. It’s really versatile for a small space like this—especially an awkward, L-shaped one. Most of the time when we are not sitting down to eat, it can just be in the background in vertical mode as a beautiful backdrop. But when we do need to entertain or watch TV, we’ll rotate it to landscape mode and watch it while cooking in the kitchen or sitting down at the dining table to eat.

Some people find it distracting to work in a place where there’s a lot of color. Why did you decide to go with all the patterns and stripes in your home office?

I think my style and background in painting and graphic design just naturally aligns with me having a really visual space. It inspires me to be creative at work. The entire back wall shelf is 90 percent decoration and 10 percent workspace. And what’s different from the decor and style of the living room is that here I’m really honing in on stripes—and stripes only. And the inspiration came from the Ettore Sottsass coffee table book you see there that looks like a barcode. I was very drawn to that texture, so this wall just ended up being, like, striped madness.

What were some of your other design influences for the space?

Besides Ettore Sotsass, I’m very inspired by works from George Sowden, Tableau, and Muller Van Severen. The dining room bouquet with the all-pink florals is also inspired by the Glossier showroom.

There are so many great DIYs and creative hacks in here. Do you have any tips for people who want to make their own decor for their apartment?

I use Apple’s Freeform app as my mood board with images of the floor plan, empty room photos, inspiration, and furniture/home decor pieces all side-by-side so I can visualize and organize in one place. This includes my DIY projects, too. I have done a lot of painting and illustration work that benefits from taking color palettes directly from the home decor pieces by using the digital color picker and planning things out ahead of time. I think DIY projects are as much about process as the final result.

The process of making something new entirely from scratch is very fun. Don’t be afraid to fail, and embrace the changes throughout the process. Sometimes things might not turn out the way I imagined, but I can take a break and keep working on it later.

I initially wanted a very construction site–inspired living room, so I DIYed a blue canvas with orange snow fencing material, and a matching blue jute rug. After living in the space for about six months I realized my design direction had changed and the construction theme evolved into more Memphis style, so I decided to take down the art and painted a new canvas that matches the current living room rug from Mush Studios.

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Project Credits:

Interior Design: Mikei Huang / @mikeihuang

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