A West Village Fixer-Upper Fit For Retirement (& Kin, For Now)

Welcome to House Calls, a recurring feature in which Curbed tours New Yorkers' lovely, offbeat, or otherwise awesome homes. Think your space should be featured next? Drop us a line.

Madeleine Tabing is counting the days until her parents leave their home in Redwood City, CA behind and relocate to New York City for their retirement. It's not because she's anxiously awaiting their arrival, or dreading it as most mid-20s NYC transplants might. It's because when they do, they're moving into the one-bedroom West Village apartment she's called home for the past year. On a recent home visit, the PR assistant account executive explained that she's lucky enough to hold down the fort until her parents, who fix and flip houses for extra income on the West Coast, reroot themselves in their first New York City project.

The apartment on West Houston has the look of a flipped property. Tabing explains that, growing up in projects that her father was working on, she developed a taste for muted palettes. "My parent's always had a 'we need to flip this' mentality," Tabing says, explaining why she chose to install a quiet gray marble tile backsplash and white Silestone quartz countertops after her parents closed on the eleventh-floor apartment. (That Silestone's one of her clients and she's familiar with their product probably also persuaded her choice.)

Before Tabing moved in, the co-op was a pied-a-terre that hadn't seen a hammer or nail in who knows how long. With the help of a contractor, the Tabings removed the wall that closed the kitchen off from the rest of the living space to create a modern, open layout. The contractor also updated the old bathroom with new tiles and fixtures, creating a look inspired by the bathrooms at Hotel Hugo. Despite the apartment's old and inefficient layout, Tabing says there's more than enough closet space. A new pantry next to the refrigerator was originally intended as a closet for the bedroom, but she ultimately deemed it unnecessary. Instead, it's an extra accessory in Tabing's favorite part of the apartment that she gets to call home, at least temporarily.

· House Calls Archives [Curbed]