Even with the best realtor, landing your ideal Manhattan apartment can be a challenge—not to mention finding the right interior designer once you’ve been handed the keys. Occasionally, though, the cart gets put before the horse, and you end up with the perfect designer first. That was the case for Bachman Clem and his clients—a couple living full-time in Stamford, Connecticut, who were on the hunt for a big city pied-à-terre.
“Another client from many years ago had put their apartment on the market, and these two happened to tour it,” Clem, the founder of New York City–based firm Bachman Brown Design, says. “Well, they didn’t like the apartment, but they loved the interior design and asked the agent if they could track me down.”
It wasn’t long before Clem was waiting in the wings as his new clients closed on a charming Greenwich Village getaway. What the couple scored was a 1,300-square-foot, two-bedroom, two-bathroom Waverly Place retreat on the eighth floor of a landmarked 1928 Art Deco building.
“They spend a lot of time escaping to the city and wanted something that felt very loungey and atypical from what they live with in Stamford,” Clem explains. So the designer—known for his bold color choices and genre-blending aesthetic—met the opportunity head-on. “It was a really nicely done apartment before, but they didn’t want it to look traditional and basically told me to ‘do something weird.’”
While the designer didn’t change the bones of the apartment, he delivered on his clients’ request for something out of the box—and the result feels plucked from a chic version of That ’70s Show, with plenty of era-appropriate design finds and a wood-paneled living room that could be mistaken for a set from Fox’s nostalgia-filled series.
“It was really influenced a lot by 1970s wood-paneled ranch houses,” Clem explains. “If we could have dug into the apartment below, we would have absolutely done a sunken living room.”
Step Inside This Sophisticated ‘70s Lair
