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If we’re lucky, a good friend can see us through a breakup. They’re there for long walks, late-night phone calls, and to be a friendly face on darker days. Actor and designer Krysta Rodriguez took it one step further: When her friend Adam Levy left his long-term relationship with a live-in partner, she turned his new NYC rental into the modern man’s bachelor pad he needed to feel like himself.

Adam and Rodriguez have known each other for over a decade. The L.A. natives met at Orange County School of the Arts, where Rodriguez, a veteran Broadway performer and alumnus, was mentoring students like Adam. When Adam moved to New York and started performing on Broadway himself, the two grew inseparable (he notes that she’s never missed one of his shows), and they now collaborate on the shows Adam produces for Disney.

When she’s not on stage, Rodriguez has a successful side hustle designing dressing rooms for fellow performers like Kristin Chenoweth, Jonathan Groff, and Lea Michele. You could say it’s a family tradition: Growing up, her parents flipped the cheapest houses in nicer neighborhoods across Orange County. When Adam’s relationship ended earlier this year, he knew he could rely on Rodriguez.

“Krysta gave me the confidence to start over,” he says. He’d found a rental in a friend’s building in Midtown Manhattan. It was spacious, but it felt cold and lacking in character—and when Adam asked Rodriguez for help, she was there in no time. “She said, ‘I want to love you through this chapter by helping you create this space,’” he adds.

“I knew exactly what I wanted to do the minute I saw the apartment,” Rodriguez says. The two shared a vision: They called it “Sexy Soho House”, Adam says, and it was full of warmth, rich textures, natural fibers, and sensual shapes. They set a deadline: The apartment would be finished in April, so that Adam’s birthday party could be a housewarming as well.

Their plan was ambitious: Adam travels for work frequently, and Rodriguez starred in Smash this spring, so she worked tirelessly between tech rehearsals. At one point, she spent her dinner breaks taking the kitchen cabinets off the walls, then mounting them on a rolling suitcase so she could easily wrap them in contact paper to match the paint for the walls.

“The learning curve was steep, and it took me 20 hours,” she says. “I was so happy to show him the cabinets and paint when he came home—that’s when he trusted that I was going to do whatever it takes.”

Their rapid pace came with compromises. Rodriguez hoped to hang wallpaper with location tape, a double-sided adhesive used in theaters to protect walls from heavy glues. It worked for the travertine finish on the bathroom console, but hanging the wood-panel wallpaper from the high ceilings was more difficult. “You don’t want someone watching you do this,” Rodriguez says. “It gets messy.” The process was too much for Adam, and he made the executive decision to install the paper with paste like normal.

Adam wanted his design finds from around the world to work in harmony with an eclectic but contemporary style, so he worked closely with Rodriguez to furnish the space—they shared pieces they found on Facebook Marketplace or in vintage shops around New York.

“We developed this term: ‘an emergency,’ which is when we saw a piece we couldn’t live without,” Adam says, gesturing to his dining chairs. “I saw these chairs and said, ‘Maybe this is an emergency?’”

Rodriguez’s response? “That’s the biggest emergency I’ve ever seen.”

Other pieces were a harder sell: Rodriguez says she had to convince Adam on the idea that they could hide living room storage in a faux fireplace...and then there was the barber station in the hallway that Adam had to collect from New Jersey. “It’s just so, so unique and so cool,” he says. “She just has that gut instinct—and what she wants is almost always what we ended up doing, even if we strayed for weeks.”

Despite the stress, the travel, and the delays, Adam hosted his housewarming party in late April, just as they’d originally planned. Rodgriguez was working until the very last minute, repotting plants and adding finishing touches, and Adam couldn’t be more grateful.

“I’d wanted to cancel the party,” he says with a slight hesitation. He pauses, then starts again.

“When we started working together, I knew it was the right decision to collaborate with Krysta because she was the driver,” he says. “I get stuck in these moments of hopelessness: I struggled to understand that this was my new reality, that I was creating a space by myself and it’s not what I thought my ten-year-plan was.”

“In those moments, she drove. She kept my eye on the prize: “Look at this piece, look at this rug.”

“That night was one of the most extraordinary nights of my life,” he says, smiling. “I can’t believe my good fortune: To have this space, and to have Krysta as my everything.”

More Rental Revamp stories:

How a Creator Found a Flat in London’s Tight Housing Market—and Made It Her Own

Their L.A. Home Is a DIY Design Test Lab

A Berlin Designer Pieces Together His Own Italo-Disco Paradise

Project Credits:

Interior Design: Krysta Rodriguez / @curated.by.kr

Cabinetry Design/Installation: Trevor Miles / @trevmiles

Painting & Wallpaper: Celso Silva, CS Painting and Wallpaper

Wallpaper & Limewash: Murah Lemos / @murahlemos

Also Appears In

Rental Revamp: “Sexy Soho House” Was the Inspiration for This Broadway Star’s Showstopping Apartment