How Well (Or Badly) Did You Decorate Your First Apartment?

FIRST DIGS ARE notoriously shabby, whether you started out in the 1980s or 2020s. Here, in a conversation led by Nina Molina and edited for clarity, Off Duty staffers spanning four age groups reminisce about living with dissonant décor and screwy design fixes hatched by necessity.

Generation Z (Nina Molina): Where were your first apartments?

Millennial (Daniel Varghese): When I came to New York in 2017, I lived in a basement in Ozone Park near JFK. No natural light and just those little strip windows. And the shower opened into the kitchen.

Generation X (Sarah Karnasiewicz): In 2000, I moved into a brick 4-story walk up on 78th St. and York Ave. with a friend. My room had no window and could barely fit a twin bed.

Baby Boomer 1 (Dale Hrabi): In the mid-1980s, I lived in a room in a former home for orphans and unwed mothers—a beautiful 1911 building in Edmonton, Alberta.

Baby Boomer 2 (Catherine Romano): My first place was a ground-floor apartment in Jackson Heights, Queens. It was dark, but at least I didn’t have any roommates.

Gen Z: I lived on the second floor of a 3-flat building in Logan Square, Chicago, with two girls. Where did you all get furniture back then?

BB2: I had a hand-me-down chest of drawers and a gate-leg table and bentwood cafe chairs from the 1920s. My bedroom set was my parents’ from the ’40s.

Gen X: I found these wood-back upholstered armchairs from the ’60s on the street and brought them home on the subway. I had them for almost 20 years.

BB1: I went to a place that rented furniture to television productions and bought a 1940s red leather sofa that had been in a million crime dramas. It was $70 because it had a huge rip in the back. I thought it was glamorous and lawyerly.

Gen Z: I have a $3 Goodwill painting that I’m pretty proud of. What were your décor workarounds?

BB2: I liked Piet Mondrian and Gerrit Rietveld—modernists into primary colors—so I painted my table a high-gloss red and each of my chairs a primary color. It was very cheerful.

BB1: Shiny things are glamorous when you’re young. Gloss paint can make any garbage look good.

BB2: In a later apartment, I bought two pine file cabinets and a 1-inch-thick piece of glass to bridge the two cabinets as a desk. That was an upscale workaround.

M: In my second New York apartment, I bought a loft from IKEA intended for 13-year-olds. I had 6 inches between the ladder and wall and about a foot and a half to sit up in bed. I put a Craigslist love seat underneath it.

BB1: I couldn’t afford art, so I made an “egg tempera” mural on the living room wall. It smelled like rotten eggs for a year. I had studied art history and thought I was doing something pretty classy.

Gen Z: Where did you get interior design inspiration from?

M: In my first years in New York, my entire Instagram feed was just beautiful interiors. I was really misguided about what was useful and covetable. We were all obsessed with West Elm just because it was slightly nicer than IKEA.

BB1: Holly Golightly’s half-assed apartment in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” Nothing made much sense but it was sort of madcap.

Gen X: I used to visit my uncle [in New York] when I was a kid. He always had tulips on the table even though he lived in a crummy building.

BB2: We were desperately trying to escape our very middle class parents. The funny thing is I replaced the hand-me-downs with other secondhand stuff.

Gen Z: I think people now like to subscribe to a certain aesthetic they’ve seen on TikTok or Pinterest, like cottagecore. They’ll make it their whole room for a year. Did roommates influence the décor?

BB1: Once I rented a room in Montreal in the apartment of an erotic novelist. On every surface, even in my room, she had these little figurines of men with erect penises. That took some getting used to.

Gen Z: Back in Chicago my roommates stapled fabric to the ceiling to be artsy. It went up one day, and I said, “Oh, my God, what is that?” So what was the best thing about your décor at the time?

M: I liked how I was willing to try things. I would see something cool and just bring it home.

BB1: The best part was how improvisational it was. It was more actively creative than just ordering from Design Within Reach. Nothing had any value, so it wasn’t precious.

Gen X: I didn’t have as much stuff. Making do seemed just fine, and I could spend time thinking about projects or workarounds. It forced you to be resourceful and that was frustrating but really exhilarating.

Gen Z: I didn’t have a coffee table in my first apartment in New York, so I learned how to sit on my couch without spilling my water when I put my feet up on my bed and ate on my lap. Now I eat at a dining table, but that time was actually fun.