A Prewar Apartment in the "Only Murders in the Building" Building Gets a Screen-Worthy Renovation

The interior of Elizabeth Seacord and Adam Feldman’s Upper West Side Manhattan apartment in The Belnord (the same opulent, early-20th-century building where Selena Gomez and two elder statesmen of comedy solve crimes in the Hulu show Only Murders in the Building) is shambolic in a way that feels comfortable, bohemian, and, above all, authentic to the family that lives there. Books, papers, and family photos cover every surface. "That’s my grandmother," Liz says of an oil painting of an eight-year-old girl that hangs in the living room. "She got kicked out of school for beating up another little girl who was being mean." A stuffed dog named Gomez (a nod to The Addams Family, not the actor), an effigy for a dearly departed pet, sits sentinel on a chair overlooking Broadway. It’s all part of a setting that is a bit of a unicorn—the kind of place you only dream about making your own. "I was really lucky," Liz says. "I married a guy named Adam Feldman," who inherited it from his mother.

The fates are familiar to Liz—"your basic astrologer–amateur photographer," she says—and luck played a role in how the recent renovation came to be. Talitha Liu and Lexi Tsien of New York design studio Soft-Firm came to Liz by way of happenstance: A conversation Tsien had on a flight with the woman sitting next to her—one of Liz’s friends—led the pair to her apartment.

"The kitchen is the heart. It pumps all the blood into the family and the rest of our apartment."

–Elizabeth Seacord, resident