Stranger Things cocreator Matt Duffer has spent most of his career conjuring immersive fictional worlds. Yet, when it came to the Manhattan pied-à-terre he recently purchased with his fiancée, Sarah Hindsgaul, he couldn’t envision the possibilities. The century-old apartment had never been renovated, aside from a dreary drop ceiling added in the ’50s. “I’m usually pretty good at imagining what something could look like,” he says. “But I struggled.”
It was Hindsgaul, the hair designer responsible for Stranger Things’s retro styles, who immediately saw potential where others might see disrepair. “I just thought it was so glorious, it had big rooms with French doors, and a little bit of outdoor space that didn’t require too much maintenance,” she says. The 1929 apartment, complete with a wood-burning fireplace and three planting terraces, was also, she admits, “a hot mess.
The couple’s 2,300-square-foot Upper East Side “classic six” needed months of work—fine by Duffer and Hindsgaul, whose primary home is in Los Angeles, where they live with daughters Pippa, 4, and Saga, 2. The six-room layout offered great bones, but required a full rethinking.
Given the scale of the overhaul, choosing the right designer felt especially important. Their designer of choice was Kyle O’Donnell of Gramercy Design, whose work on Stranger Things actor David Harbour’s downtown loft resonated with them. “We just called him up, and we connected immediately,” says Duffer. “Kyle had a strong view of what he could do with the space, and Sarah did as well, so I deferred to them.”
O’Donnell was thrilled to have the opportunity to “touch every surface” of the dignified home. “We wanted to respect the architecture of the building itself,” he says. “So we reinterpreted a lot of details like plaster moldings and restored the oak flooring.”
Everyone agreed to keep the existing layout, with some modifications. The primary bedroom’s narrow bathroom was expanded by relocating the vanity into a new dressing area, and the kitchen gained a few square feet. “We needed a more modern kitchen,” says Hindsgaul. “I grew up in Copenhagen, and I was really missing that kind of European layout.” Her Scandinavian roots informed another aspect of the kitchen: wall tiles depicting Viking ships, which O’Donnell commissioned from Douglas Watson Studio in England to read as a single Delft-style mural.
“We were playing it safe in the beginning, but then we presented bolder design choices, and they kept saying yes,” says O’Donnell. “It became this much more fun, fantastical apartment.”
O’Donnell’s design skills were put to the test in the living room, where structural issues prevented his team from removing the entire drop ceiling. Turning the constraint on its head, he created a recessed oval “dome” hung with a sculptural plaster chandelier. “It is really interesting how some of the obstacles that appeared as we were doing the renovations, he turned them into pieces of architectural art,” says Hindsgaul.
Then there’s the room’s central sofa, which had to be durable enough for the couple’s two young daughters and large enough to seat up to ten for movie nights. O’Donnell came up with a 15-foot-long Brutalist piece consisting of rows of cubes facing three directions, upholstered in rust-colored mohair. “I don’t know many people that would go for that,” says the designer. “With clients like Sarah and Matt, it was an opportunity to try things that I’ve never tried before.” More color and whimsy awaits in the adjacent dining room, a space wrapped in a hand-painted mural depicting botanical scenes in shades of green and amber, made by artist Dean Barger.
The room Duffer and Hindsgaul were initially most unsure about is the one they love the most: the primary suite, lacquered from head to toe in Benjamin Moore’s Chocolate Candy Brown, and furnished with a red leatherette vanity set.
“I was really scared that it was going to look almost too sexy in some way—it’s an intense color combination,” says Hindsgaul, who even used the palette as a jumping-off point for the marketing of her new haircare brand. “It’s definitely my favorite bedroom I have ever had,” she adds.
Duffer agrees. “Sometimes I find New York to be overstimulating, so it was important to me that we had a place to retreat to,” says the auteur, who’s busy working on a Stranger Things spinoff, and a feature film, with his brother Ross. “My favorite thing about the apartment is that you go in, and there's a very calming energy to it—the bedroom in particular.”
While many second homes eventually circulate out of an owner’s life, this one is poised to last. “I have no intention of ever getting rid of this apartment,” says Hindsgaul. “I might get old here.”
