Madelynn Furlong Refined Her "Ugly Duckling" NYC Apartment One Paint Job at a Time

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The previous year, Madelynn Furlong chose to downsize. “I let go of nearly half of my belongings,” she recalls, exchanging her 1,000-plus-square-foot Los Angeles apartment for a one-bedroom half the size in New York’s West Village. “So yes, it’s tiny.”

Even so, the Streeteasy listing alone charmed her with its crown molding, working fireplace, arched doorways, and 13-foot floor-to-ceiling windows. The warped kitchen cabinets? The stained walls? Those she could remedy herself. “It was an ugly duckling with loads of potential. I just knew I could make it feel cozy and personal,” says Furlong. “When the architecture is good, you can layer in furniture, paint, and cosmetic touches to disguise the fact that it’s actually falling apart.”

Before signing the lease and packing up, Furlong drafted not only a floor plan but a strategy to negotiate her rent. The timing was ideal—it was winter, and the market was still offering pandemic-low rates. By bargaining the price down further (by $400 a month), she could channel those savings into refreshing the unit, a series of projects she pitched to her landlord. “You can present them with a mood board, and if it elevates the apartment—and you’re not painting something lime green—they’re usually happy to let you proceed. They just won’t contribute financially,” she notes, laughing. “That’s why, in my apartments, I do whatever I want, knowing I likely won’t get the deposit back.”

Among the first things Furlong parted with were the white walls. “I love bold design—plenty of texture and pattern—but I keep it all within a restrained palette, which, for me, reads fairly neutral,” she explains. You’ll rarely encounter shades beyond her signature beige, black, and cream combination. In the bedroom, however, a vintage Moroccan rug by ZouZou inspired the Benjamin Moore Toasted Marshmallow walls and the search for a matching CB2 bed set. “It’s like caramel overload, right? Some people hate it,” says Furlong. “I find it playful and sexy.”

Everywhere you look there’s a whisper of marble or a moment of contrast—like the living room swathed in Farrow & Ball’s Slipper Satin and the fireplace finished in the moodier Jitney. (Hot tip: an 18-inch paint roller will save you time.) In the bathroom, Furlong initially struggled to settle on an approach. After working through layers of Citristrip on a painted-over window, she chose to embrace the absence of a view, coating the trim in black and layering a copper cloverleaf-pattern grate over the bare glass.

Cans of Backdrop’s Dark Arts lent a touch of drama to her entryway, while a matte chalkboard-paint version did the trick for the lower kitchen cabinets, where she worked to erase nearly every trace of primer-white paint. Yet even after refinishing her laminate countertops with a marble-look kit from Amazon and replacing the dated uppers with slices of lumber she stained by hand, Furlong still sensed something was off: the fridge.

“I managed to find something more vintage-inspired. And given how compact it was, it was only $500,” she says, noting the swap was well worth it, even though the appliance accounted for roughly half the renovation’s cost. “It made such a difference in elevating the kitchen.”

Which mattered greatly, given it’s visible from nearly every vantage point in Furlong’s main room (fellow small-space dwellers will sympathize). That’s why she positioned her pedestal table perpendicular to the fireplace to ease the transition from kitchen to living area; it serves as an island, offering more room for food prep than her actual counters. She even swapped her former dining chairs for a new set of stools from Hem that occupy far less square footage. “I can simply tuck them beneath the table,” she notes.

Still, resist the urge to acquire brand-new everything each time you move, she advises. “I think you reach a point where you’ve gathered furniture you genuinely love,” says Furlong, who merely commissioned custom cushions to reimagine her old De Sede daybed as a sofa.

“When I invest in my home and the way it looks, I’m ultimately nurturing myself,” Furlong continues. True, the creative had to part with a good share of her belongings to relocate to New York, but she has gained far more—including a 70-pound (and growing!) Great Dane puppy that loves to climb into her lap and bask in the sun streaming through the south-facing windows. For a while, Furlong was soaking up the good vibes on her own. “Now I have a new dog, a man I’m going to marry, and a house upstate—all of that unfolded because I chose to move here,” she says. “It has changed the trajectory of my life completely.”

Belle is the in-house photographer and associate photo editor for Domino, capturing everything from home tours to gift guides, plus the occasional how-to project. She joined the photo team as an intern in 2018 and was brought on full time in January 2021.

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