www.nytimes.com/2010/03/04/garden/04cheap.html
COLIN KELLY, a 2008 Columbia law school graduate, had furnished the living room in his apartment in the financial district much the same way he did his student housing. "I don't get anything until I need it," Mr Kelly, 27, told this reporter on a visit to his apartment not long ago.
The result -- a mostly bare space with a motley assortment of brown furniture -- left Mr Kelly, who had paid $572,000 for his apartment on the ninth floor of a high rise, feeling as if it wasn't living up to its potential. On several occasions, he had set out to buy a new sofa or pick new paint colors, but the effort had left him overwhelmed. "If you buy a bad poster, you can put it up in a bedroom, and no one is going to see it," he said. "The problem with a sofa is if you get it wrong, you're going to have to live with it every day." Adam Rolston, Drew Stuart and Gabriel Benroth, the founding partners of Incorporated Architecture & Design in Manhattan, agreed to take on the project free, and scheduled an initial consultation in mid-August. Mr Kelly invited his girlfriend, Zahava Blumenthal, to attend the meeting and to participate in the makeover, and when the designers arrived, the two welcomed them into the living room and invited them to take a seat. Mr Stuart headed for an ottoman but changed his mind after noticing a big dark stain. "I think that is a burrito that fell," Mr Kelly said, drawing laughter from his guests. Mr Rolston began questioning their new client about everything from the absence of a dining table to whether he wanted to entertain, gently ribbing Mr Kelly about how empty the apartment was. "Of the seven things in here," he said, "are you attached to any of them?" "Other than the TV," Mr Kelly replied, referring to a giant flat screen, "I'm not attached to anything. Actually, I'm negatively attached to some things, like this sofa." When Mr Rolston asked about his taste in furnishings, Mr Kelly admitted that he would be grateful if the designers would help him overcome his conservative instincts. "If I pick everything by myself, things will look very conventional," he said. "I'm a tax lawyer, but I'm more interesting than that would suggest. His budget, he told them, was the exact amount of the 2009 first-time homebuyer's tax credit: $8,000. The designers promised to help him uncover his sense of style, and to that end, they asked him to buy a few shelter magazines so he could show them pictures of what he liked at their next meeting. Before leaving, Mr Rolston pointed out a problem Mr Kelly hadn't mentioned -- a soffit that partly blocked a window -- and then asked about the provenance of a colorful glass vase. When he was in college at Harvard, Mr Kelly sheepishly admitted, he and several roommates had found it at 2 am in the middle of Massachusetts Avenue, "mysteriously filled with urine." "It was probably some fraternity thing," he said, "and they left it in the middle of the road." But it had been thoroughly cleaned with bleach, he added, and every few years a different roommate took custody. "That," Mr Rolston said, "is going to go in a really prominent place."
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