Rental Revamp: A Fashionable Couple’s "Pinch Me" NYC Home Is Full of Quirks and Handmade Details

There are good Brooklyn apartment deals, and then there are the kinds of finds which feel so cosmically unlikely in this economy—reasonably priced, flush with amenities, with a frictionless leasing process—that you start to wonder whether you’ve stumbled upon some kind of grift.

The rental in question is a large studio in prime Greenpoint with a basement and a private outdoor space, not to mention an extremely generous broker who was willing to show it to the prospective renters—GQ commerce style writer Gerald Ortiz and his partner, fashion designer Kate Walz—ahead of the market, and hold it until they’d mulled it over. As Gerald tells it, "We didn’t even know a place like this existed." 

In early 2022, they’d explored southward in neighborhoods like Clinton Hill and Dumbo, but nothing compared to the studio space in the basement of this apartment—already kitted out with a bench table for Kate to store her sewing supplies so she could work directly out of the home.

Kate, a Nebraska transplant, was taken by the spaciousness of it all. "I’ve always had kitchens that are, like, a tile wide," she jokes. "Now we have an outdoor space where I can have my coffee every summer morning."