Not long ago, James Davison and his wife, Fanny Abbes, left lucrative careers in finance to start a company, the New Project Group, that rents out designed, furnished apartments in New York City. More recently, the pair parlayed Abbes’ degree from Parsons the New School for Design into a subsidiary interior-design venture that they are calling the New Design Project.

For one of their first projects, they were approached by a young couple who had just bought their first apartment, a cramped, uninviting space on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. “They bought it back in October or November, and it didn’t have much going for it; it needed a complete overhaul,” Davison says. “So they asked us to come in and gut-renovate it. So we ripped out the kitchen, ripped out the bathroom, and gave it a complete cosmetic makeover.”

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