Designer Sam Masters waited 16 years to land his 420-square-foot apartment

Many try their luck at finding the New York City unicorn apartment—the charming, affordable, rent-controlled, off-market unit. And most fail. But interior designer Sam Masters achieved the unthinkable: a prewar, one-bedroom in the heart of the West Village.

While Masters lives on a bustling (and sometimes noisy) corner in the West Village, his philosophy is to embrace it: “It’s really nice to just have a friend over, open the windows, and feel like you’re ‘out’ without having to go out.”

Of course, this wouldn’t be a true New York City fairy tale without a bit of drama. It took Masters 16 years and six apartments to land here. But when he did, it almost felt scripted: “When I first moved to Manhattan, my friends and I went out one night and walked down Bleecker Street. It was just so alive, and I looked up at these very windows and wondered who lived there.” Of course, like any true New Yorker, Masters is quick to temper that memory with the caveat that the Village has “become overrun and a little annoying.”

On the left, Masters re-covered a Safavieh chair in mohair fabric by Maharam. The large artwork above a settee is a charcoal drawing by Roger Jones.

But Masters isn’t afraid of leaning into the (well-earned) city cliché. “[My apartment] definitely has a very 2000s-ish New York City feel,” the designer says. “It’s got that Sex and the City vibe of the West Village, which I love, and it’s quirky—you know, crumbling plaster walls and paper-thin windows, so it’s loud.” Manhattan is, after all, an island of trade-offs.

The apartment features one New York City rarity: a working fireplace. The black wooden slat blinds are from Blinds.com.

While the rattan Anthropologie sconces are beautiful, they aren’t functional—“they’re hiding holes,” the designer admits. The mirror is a custom design by Charleston-based artist Bob Hines.

Most of the groundwork for the design was already laid with Farrow & Ball’s Pidgeon covering most of the walls of the 420-square-foot space. The kitchen needed the most zhuzh-ing (as much as one can do in a rental). The teeny area, “which is really less of a kitchen and more of a scullery,” as Masters puts it, proved difficult to land in terms of color. After three previous attempts (white, light green, dark green), he settled on Farrow & Ball’s Olive, an earthy green, to coat both the walls and cabinets, and added hardware from Rejuvenation. Masters also DIY’d the marble countertop by taking a template to Atlas Marble in New Jersey, lugging the cut slab back home in an Uber, and installing it with the building’s super.

With any “dream” apartment in Manhattan, there’s usually a trade-off. In this case, it’s a cramped kitchen that’s “more of a scullery,” Masters says. The cabinets and walls are painted in Farrow & Ball’s Olive. The bamboo window blind is by Joss Graham. A Nickey Kehoe scallop sconce illuminates the space.

The bedroom is a study in small-space restraint and ingenuity. Masters stores his clothes in an IKEA Pax wardrobe upgraded with Fornasetti wallpaper; shoes go in a rolling box under the bed painted the same color as the walls to blend in. The headboard is also a bit of DIY magic—just pleated fabric held in place by heavy-duty magnets that attach to the metal bedframe. Nickey Kehoe sconces peek through to provide extra illumination without taking up floor or table space.

The bathroom is fairly standard as far as NYC rentals go, but Masters added cheer and character by coating the walls in Farrow & Ball’s String and adding a tiny table from Zara Home. The small lamp on the windowsill is by Visual Comfort.

Masters spends most of his time in the living room, which feels “very French and pied-à-terre-y.” The armless loveseats upholstered in Fermoie’s Cove fabric are compact enough to allow for extra seating and a café table. He framed the petite working fireplace (yet another NYC triumph) with rattan sconces, which are nonworking. “They’re hiding holes,” he says nonchalantly. The metal chairs were a score from an employee sale when Masters worked as a bellhop at the Greenwich Hotel during his early years in the city.

Masters calls the small foyer his “outdoing room,” a spot for a bit of extra storage and odds and ends from the Masters’s design projects. He wallpapered an IKEA Stockholm cabinet in Phillip Jeffries’s Enchanted Woods paper. The walls are painted in Dead Salmon by Farrow & Ball, and the ceiling light is by Entler.

Storage in the living room spans both extremes. In one corner, books are stacked in tall piles on the floor: “purely because I don’t have enough shelving,” he says. But a modular Vitsoe 606 unit on the other side of the room offers a more orderly solution. The Vitsoe system, Masters remarks, is ideal for New York transient living: “Mine is on its third iteration. I have pieces in storage. You can always add to it.”

Interior designer Sam Masters perches on the window of his West Village apartment. The disco balls are his own touch. He changes out the decor on the posts seasonally—skeletons in fall and Christmas trees in winter.

While small spaces can easily feel cluttered, Masters didn’t let that stop him from leaning into accessorizing with vintage trinkets and art that fill every corner of the home. “I’m very much [into] more is more and covering every surface with stuff,” he says. “My home is like a teensy dollhouse. You have to make it fun.”

The bedroom features Farrow & Ball’s Lime White on the walls, with a contrasting window casement and radiator painted in black. Masters says this room feels hotel-like with Room & Board’s Architecture bed dressed in Pratesi sheets. The ceiling light is a Serge Mouille–inspired fixture from France & Son. The closet is covered in a Fornasetti wallpaper.

Reflecting on that first glimpse of the apartment years ago from the sidewalk of Bleecker Street, Masters says he tries to repay the sense of New York magic: “I always leave my lights on now. I just want to keep that feeling going.”

The French wood mushroom trio on the Vitsoe 606 shelving system are one of Masters’s favorite finds. He sourced the oil landscape painting from an antiques shop in New Jersey.