4 RE MB THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, JULY 26, 2020Cooped up at home these past four months,
many New Yorkers have found themselves
longing for larger apartments. But Kayla
Oberlin and her partner, Inbar Madar, who
moved from a two-bedroom in Bushwick to
a studio apartment in a Williamsburg high-
rise late last fall, are not among them.
“Honestly I don’t miss it,” said Ms. Ober-
lin, 30, of the couple’s old two-bedroom in
Brooklyn. “It was a railroad apartment and
despite being relatively large, it was pretty
dark.”
“We used the second bedroom as storage
and office space,” she continued. “It was
easy to give up that square footage for more
light. This feels really big and open.”
Even after months of working — and do-
ing pretty much everything else — from
home, “we’re not suffocating,” said Ms.
Madar, 28. They also share the space with
their cat and dog.
Ms. Oberlin and Ms. Madar started look-
ing for a new apartment last fall, a few
months before the lease was up on their
Bushwick place, where they’d been for the
past few years. “It was a great space but we
were living above a bar and a lot of tourists
were coming constantly to the area for graf-
fiti tours,” said Ms. Oberlin, who had previ-
ously lived in a shared apartment in the
same building. “We were looking for a
slower pace.”
The Williamsburg waterfront, close to a
number of their favorite shops, music ven-
ues and cafes like Mogador and Reunion,
seemed like an ideal spot to relocate — vi-
brant but not quite so raucous. One of the
places they checked out was the new
mixed-use tower One South First, devel-
oped by Two Trees Management Company,
which opened last September at the site of
the former Domino Sugar Refinery.
The couple liked a studio apartment there
so much they decided to break their lease.
Their landlord agreed to the early depar-
ture as long as they found new tenants,
which wasn’t hard as they’d been paying
$1,950 a month.
“What we really liked about the apart-
ment was that it’s considered a studio but
there is a separation between the living
room-kitchen and the bedroom,” Ms. Madar
said. It was also one of few units in the build-
ing that had both that studio layout and a
view of the Williamsburg Bridge and East
River.
And though the rent was a significant
jump from their previous place — $3,900 a
month — they felt comfortable with the in-
crease because of all the building offered.
Before the coronavirus shutdown, Ms.
Madar reasoned, they’d be able to save
money on gym membership.
They were also excited about the restau-
rants that were scheduled to open in the
building’s retail spaces: Roberta’s Pizza,
OddFellows Ice Cream and Other Half
Brewing Company. They liked that the
custom hair-care brand Prose planned to
move into the building’s office leg, and that
there would also be a 2,800-square-foot co-
working space.
Ms. Madar, who is a brand manager, and
Ms. Oberlin, who is in customer relations,
met while working at a skin-care company;
they now work at different luxury hair-care
companies. They speculated that, maybe if
the right opportunity came up, one or both
of them might work from their own building
in the future.
They had no idea, of course, that in just a
few months they’d be working from their
building whether they liked it or not: Ms.
Oberlin from a standing desk in the bed-
room area and Ms. Madar in the living room
area. (Ms. Madar has also made use of some
of the shared lounges in the building.) Or
that the opening of the restaurants down-
stairs would be delayed and the building’s
gym would be closed until the government
allows fitness facilities to reopen.
But they’ve found the space a pleasant
place to quarantine, almost surprisingly so.
They may be largely confined to two-ish
rooms, but at least the view is expansive.
“The view is sort of an extension of the
space in here,” Ms. Oberlin said. “Sunsets
and sunrises are really beautiful. It’s nice to
wake up with the sun, and our schedules are
better because we’re not fighting the dark-
ness. It’s definitely alleviated our mental
space.”
Ms. Madar said, “You can take a five-
minute break just looking out the window.”
They also walk in Domino Park, which is
right in front of their building, but only in
the mornings, when it’s less crowded. The
social-distancing circles painted on the
park’s turf help with that, but as Ms. Oberlin
pointed out, “The park is pretty strict about
where dogs can and cannot be, and the As-
troTurf is one of the only areas in that park
where dogs are allowed, so I personally
would not sit on it.”
They’ve also found a good alternative to
the closed gym: the stairs in their 45-story
building.
In the future, however, they might con-
sider upgrading to a one-bedroom. It’s not
that they need more square feet, but an-
other wall would be nice.
“Right now we have the TV in the bed-
room,” Ms. Oberlin said. “The living room
has only one real wall and it’s the couch
wall, so we’d be under it if we put it there.
We often think, ‘If we just had one more an-
gle.... ’ ”RENTERSFinding More Space in a Studio Than a Two-Bedroom
By KIM VELSEYKayla Oberlin, top left, and Inbar Madar moved with their cat and dog to a studio on the
Williamsburg waterfront late last fall, downsizing from their two-bedroom above a Bushwick bar.PHOTOGRAPHS BY KAYLA OBERLIN AND INBAR MADAR
Know a renter with an interesting story?
Email: [email protected].
NamesKayla Oberlin, 30,
and Inbar Madar, 28
LocationWilliamsburg,
Brooklyn
Rent$3,
Occupation Ms. Oberlin
works in customer relations
for a hair-care company and
Ms. Madar is a brand man-
ager for a different hair-care
company.
The kitchenwhere they’ve
been spending more time,
has more counter and stor-
age space than the one in
their last apartment.
For Ms. Oberlin’s 30th
birthdayMs. Madar man-
aged to hide 30 presents
around the apartment.My house is not what it used to be.
On any given morning, passing through
the living room, I might spot a random Ama-
zon package here, a pile of discarded face
masks there. There’s a good chance that an
open box of art supplies for my daughter’s
Zoom summer camp is sitting in a corner by
the fireplace, waiting for the contents to be
strewn across the dining table in a few
hours — as if my dining room was always
meant to be home to an art class.
The living room used to be relatively tidy,
cluttered with only normal living room stuff
— a stray newspaper section, a coffee cup,
slippers. Now, four months into this coro-
navirus existence, I have lost the thread.
Rooms no longer have a clear purpose,
since any given space could, at any mo-
ment, become a gym or a classroom or a
video conference room with the camera ex-
pertly angled to hide the mayhem. With no
one coming over for the foreseeable future,
what’s the point in pretending? Normal
isn’t coming back anytime soon.
“At the very beginning it was, ‘OK, we
need to figure out what this home-school
thing is; it’s only however many weeks until
summer,’ ” said Joanna Teplin, an owner of
the Home Edit, a Nashville-based organ-
izing company. “But now, the reality is just
very clear and it’s setting in that this is life
now.”
And life now isn’t pretty.
Perla Mondriguez, 41, a mother in West
Orange, N.J., with three school-age sons,
one of whom has special needs, told me that
she had come to see the pandemic through
the lens of her entryway table. It used to be
such a nice table, with flowers, a candle, the
day’s mail and a little tray to hold spare
change. Now it’s a free-for-all.
Here is a sampling of the objects residing
there on the day we spoke: a large seashell
from the beach, a pair of utility gloves,
swimming goggles, an assortment of cotton
masks, measuring tape, a Nintendo Switch
and a pile of crumpled receipts.
“The shoes, holy moly!” Ms. Mondriguez
said of the pile of sandals, cleats, sneakers
and flip-flops shoved under the table. “Nor-
mally we don’t have all the shoes out.”
Normally, the boys, ages 8, 11 and 13,
would be out doing typical summer things
— playing soccer or hanging out with
friends. Instead, the youngest has taken to
building forts from enormous cardboard
boxes, with a tunnel that he crawls through
to get into his room — not exactly a space-
saving endeavor. The 11-year-old is midway
through a 300-piece puzzle project that has
consumed the dining table. And the 13-year-
old has gone full teenager, rarely leaving his
room, even for meals. “No lie, it smells,” Ms.
Mondriguez said of his bedroom.
In before times, she would have tidied up
when the children were at school. But those
moments of solitude are gone. Her hus-
band, David Acosta, 45, who works for a
property management company in Man-
hattan, has been back in the office since
April. So Ms. Mondriguez, a dog walker
whose business is just now starting up
again, is on her own at their four-bedroom
house. Tidying up has fallen way down the
list of priorities.
“What’s the point?” she said. “You’renever alone to crank some music, to sit here
for an hour and empty the fridge and wipe
the spills. That takes energy. And it’s hard to
find that when there are three other living
beings constantly there to tend to.”
As the months of pandemic life wear on,
many of us are finding ourselves weary of
the homes we rarely leave. Sure, some peo-
ple have gotten their cleaning routines
down to an art, with sinks that sparkle and
coffee tables that display only coffee-table
books. But I am not one of those people.
My home is in a constant state of use, and
so the clutter gathers and the dust settles.
With no deadlines on the horizon — forget
summer parties, we don’t even aspire to
leave the house on Monday morning — the
days bleed into one another, each a surreal
version of the last. Even with lockdown or-ders lifted, we remain perpetually quasi-
homebound. Where is there to go anyway?
“Everything is so loosey-goosey, there’s
no finite end to any of this and we’re coast-
ing from one week to another,” said Cynthia
Kienzle, a home organizer in Manhattan
whose business is down almost 90 percent
since the start of the pandemic. “We’re all
just drifting. We can’t plan anything, we
can’t travel. It just destroys any sense of or-
derliness that you might have had in your
home.”
Many homeowners, concerned about let-
ting anyone inside, are still not calling their
housekeepers back yet. The housekeepers
who have returned are finding rooms in
need of some serious scrubbing. Not only
have homeowners struggled to keep up
with the weekly regime, they’ve also been
using their spaces more — a lot more.
“After two or three months, even if the cli-
ents tried to keep it nice and clean, they still
needed the help,” said Anna Harasim, the
owner of Anna’s Cleaning Service in Man-
hattan, who said that only half of her regular
clients had resumed services.
Ms. Teplin, of the Home Edit, attributes
the malaise to summer doldrums. Who
wants to keep up with the house when the
weather is nice and we can finally venture
out? But she is already looking ahead to
September, when another year of tele-
schooling begins for millions of families
around the country. She sees now as the
time to get it together and figure out where
everything belongs.
“Winter is coming,” Ms. Teplin said. “I
know no one wants to think about that stuff
and do the prep because everyone is trying
to have a semblance of summer, but it’s go-
ing to be so much harder when the kids go
back to school.”
Faith Roberson, a home organizer in
Manhattan, suggests choosing a day for
each chore and sticking with it. Monday is
for decluttering, Tuesday is for laundry, and
so on. But even a professional organizer has
her limits. “Who cares?” she said. “I know
you want to keep the table clean, but if the
table’s not clean, the table’s not clean.”
Just because we’re in our homes all the
time doesn’t mean they deserve all of our
attention. We’ve passed the sourdough-
making phase of the pandemic and entered
a new, amorphous one with no exit ramp in
sight. Ms. Roberson suggests accepting
that our homes are simply not going to get
all the love all the time, and so be it.
“You have other needs,” she said. “You
may want to get into crafting, you may want
to meditate.” And you certainly may not
want to clean all the junk off the entryway
table. Maybe just leave it there and finish a
300-piece puzzle instead.As You Can See, Marie Kondo Doesn’t Live Here
Since no one’s coming over
during the pandemic, we don’t
clean as often. It shows.
Just because we’re in
our homes all the time
doesn’t mean they
deserve all of our
attention.TRISHA KRAUSSRIGHT AT HOMEBy RONDA KAYSEN