Copyright The New Yorker
In 2017, Jessica Levy Buchman, a real-estate agent in Brooklyn, got a call from a couple looking to sell a three-bedroom apartment at 120 Prospect Park West. The location, in the heart of Park Slope, was unbeatable: steps from a host of restaurants, two subway lines, and a high-performing public elementary school, with a primary bedroom that boasted clear views of the park’s lush foliage. But the apartment, a duplex on the first two floors of a former Gilded Age mansion, was riddled with what are known, in the real-estate business, as “challenges.” The kitchen was minuscule and outfitted with ancient appliances. The living room, encased in dark mahogany panelling, looked onto a drab alleyway filled with trash bins, and the apartment’s two floors were connected by a narrow spiral staircase that risked putting parents in mind of a broken neck. To attract buyers, Buchman wanted the couple to invest in sprucing up their home’s presentation. They hired a different broker. “I understand,” Buchman told them. “I’m sure you’ll sell in a minute.” But the apartment didn’t sell in a minute, or a month, or a year. According to the real-estate search engine StreetEasy, a property in Park Slope spends a median of seventy-eight days on the market. At 120 Prospect Park West, however, 2018 went by, and so did 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024. New York apartments are like fish: the longer one sits, the worse it stinks. 120 Prospect Park West stank. Its price, first listed as two and a quarter million dollars, rose, then dropped, then rose and dropped again. It was yanked off the market and plopped back on. Brokers came and went—seven of them in seven years—and still, no sale. Finally, the couple came back to Buchman. “I said, ‘Listen, if you’re ready for me, this is what I want to do, and this is who I want to do it,’ ” she recalled. “Meaning, Jason.” Jason is the home stager Jason Saft. One morning this past April, he stood in the bare living room of the apartment as a team of movers hustled in and out, depositing furniture, rugs, lamps, art work, and an array of highly realistic artificial snake plants and fiddle-leaf fig trees. Saft bent over a sofa that was swaddled in a heavy blue blanket, vigorously slashing at packing tape. One side of his utility knife was bedazzled with a rainbow pattern; on the other, the phrase “BOSS BITCH” was spelled out in rhinestones. The room was filled with a dense, woodsy scent. “I saged,” Saft explained. “I’m going to get the ghosts out.” Saft, forty-eight, is fit and compactly built. He has a dark chevron mustache, a gold-and-steel Rolex, and the commanding, multifocal presence of a movie director or field general. For years, he treated staging as a sideline to his day job as a real-estate agent. In 2020, when the pandemic briefly brought the churn of New York’s real-estate business to a halt, he decided to devote himself full time to Staged to Sell Home, a company he had founded a few years before to turn uninspiring New York City properties into aspirational eye candy of the sort that is regularly showcased in glossy interior-design magazines and on high-end decorators’ social-media accounts. On his own Instagram page, Saft highlights his dramatic before-and-after transformations with the aplomb of a makeover artist, revealing how superficial tweaks—a fresh coat of well-chosen paint, plush furnishings, eye-popping art—can give a property an irresistible new personality. Some of the homes that Saft works on are inherently spectacular. Last year, he staged both 973 Fifth Avenue, a seven-story limestone mansion that is one of the rare remaining single-family homes in the city designed by the firm McKim, Mead & White, and a four-thousand-square-foot duplex, farther up Museum Mile, that was most recently owned by Maria Niscemi Romanoff, a Sicilian princess whose late husband was a descendant of the last tsar. But Saft’s true passion is for diamonds in the rough. He is drawn to homes whose beauty lies buried beneath decades of stale design choices and neglect. “Give me your tired, your poor condition huddled messes yearning to be chic,” he recently wrote on Instagram, under a photo montage of rusted sinks, peeling paint, and chipped woodwork. Realtors oblige. When they are stuck with a troubled property, it is Saft they call. “He really is the only one in his league,” Laura Rozos, a broker at Compass, told me. “He’s a magician,” another said. Buchman had promised her clients that they would have a signed contract thirty days after their apartment hit the market. Saft found the pressure energizing. “Anything that has a listing history like this is like an aphrodisiac,” he said. Not long before, he had turned down a project in a super-tall tower on the section of Fifty-seventh Street known as Billionaires’ Row. “I can do it, but it’s not my wheelhouse,” he said. “It’s easy to put beautiful furniture in a beautiful apartment that no one’s going to ever be in. It doesn’t excite me.” In New York, the story of real estate is also a story of reincarnation. A home will outlast any one of its residents, and Saft sees himself as creating a link between its past and its future. “What we are talking about is bringing things back to life,” he said. Conventional wisdom dictates that the best way to stage a home is to depersonalize it. When prospective buyers are trying to imagine a fresh life in a new place, the last thing they want is to be confronted with someone else’s family photos or funky shag rug. In New York, where open houses are often rushed, crowded affairs, a buyer may spend less time in her future apartment than she might trying on clothes at a boutique. Ultimately, the decision of where to live comes down to a quickly formed impression, and a bad one is hard to shake. The covers of manuals like “Home Staging for Dummies” and “Secrets of Home Staging” show spaces drained of color and character, in the manner of an Airbnb: better to present a blank canvas, such thinking goes, than to risk repelling with specificity. Saft deplores this conciliatory blandness. “White on white on white,” he calls it. “It’s just like the home page of Wayfair. Everything is dull and banal.” He prefers to go on the aesthetic offensive, designing richly textured, bountifully accessorized spaces that aim to stoke visitors’ fantasies not merely of a given property’s potential but of the sophisticated life style that it could signify. He loves spiky chandeliers, velvet sofas, statement coffee tables made of veined marble and raw-edged burled wood, and sensuously curved accent chairs. He embraces color drenching, a trendy decorating technique that entails painting the trim and ceiling of a room the same shade as its walls. (The English paint company Farrow & Ball, which itself has a reputation for catering to the stylish élite, is his brand of choice.) Beds are a particular forte; Saft makes them in the way that a maître d’ at a Michelin-starred restaurant sets a table, ironing the linens smooth and placing the plumped pillows just so. “If the average time in an apartment is twelve minutes, I want them to be there for an hour,” he said. “I want someone that’s basically said ‘I’m buying this apartment’ before they’ve left.” One morning last spring, I dropped in on Saft as he and his team were staging a two-bedroom apartment on the twelfth floor of 860 Fifth Avenue, a postwar building a few blocks from the Central Park Zoo. A sense of urgency pervaded the space. In the living room, an assistant with ear gauges and a sleeve tattoo stood on a ladder, hanging sheer white curtains. “If you just steamed them, don’t roll them into a ball!” Saft called out. In the kitchen, another assistant grimaced as she heaved a boulder-size clamshell onto a counter. This turned out to be a decorative piece left by the previous occupants; soon, it would get boxed up and sent to a warehouse where Saft keeps his inventory. It wasn’t the only item going back. “They sent the wrong tabletop,” Saft said into his phone, with controlled intensity, as he surveyed a disk of glass that dwarfed its gold-leaf base. When Saft first visited the apartment, it was in what is known as estate condition. “Someone passed away, and the family is selling the asset to be distributed amongst the heirs,” he explained. “Family members came, took what they wanted, and things just started to fall apart.” He scrolled through his phone to share pictures of tobacco-colored wallpaper, heavy floral drapes, and floors that had been oddly painted to mimic parquet. “This was the den,” he said, pulling up an image of a room with billiard-green carpeting and stools that resembled saddles splayed on roasting spits. “They loved horses, so it was sort of a Western theme.” He had repainted the room in Dead Salmon, a purplish taupe; the saddles had been replaced with a handsome wooden coffee table and a caramel-hued tufted-leather sofa. Nodding along to music playing from a wireless speaker—“I like a vibe,” Saft said—he began to style the room’s built-in shelving, mingling an assortment of enticingly battered books in shades of terra-cotta with glazed ceramic candlesticks, abstract black-and-white paintings, and undulating stoneware vases. He tried some red books, then removed them: too much. He placed an embossed edition of “Leaves of Grass” next to a collection of poems by John Keats and topped a pair of coffee-table books with a gnarled, ursine leather mask whose sewn-shut mouth suggested dark erotic proclivities. The mood was comfortably urbane, with edge. Unlike a decorator, who must design a space with a client’s specific tastes in mind, Saft has free rein to execute his vision—no suggestions, no notes. He will not work in a home that is occupied, or stage only a single floor or a few rooms for the sake of a seller’s frugality. “The first step is sitting in the space and asking, Who is the target audience?” Saft told me. A buyer on the Upper East Side will typically have a more traditional sense of style than one in Tribeca or Brooklyn; a young family will not have the same needs as empty nesters looking to downsize. The goal is to make the right person feel at home, without alienating anybody else. “Staging creates an emotional connection,” Buchman, the real-estate agent, said. “Even though I’ve been in this business for a million years, if I walk into a place and it looks like the way I aspire to live, I succumb to that. And I should know better.” She first encountered Saft’s work in 2021, at an open house for a Park Slope townhome. “Every single thing was curated for the Brooklyn boho journalist with money,” she recalled. “Emotionally, it just hooked me like a rainbow trout.” Sometimes the architecture of a space itself suggests to Saft the type of person who might live there. “I just did this penthouse at Tudor City,” he told me as he knelt on a bedroom rug at 860 Fifth Avenue, smoothing out wrinkles. “The apartment was featured in the ‘Spider-Man’ movies as the home of the Green Goblin, the Willem Dafoe character. It had this really elegant staircase, and I kept thinking of Auntie Mame’s apartment. And there’s this little Juliet balcony off the dining room that overlooks it, and I kept pretending to be Madonna as Eva Perón in ‘Evita.’ ” He began to imagine its future resident: a cultivated woman who lives out of town but comes into the city once a month to see art shows and attend business meetings. “She wants something special,” Saft said. The apartment, which had sat on the market for seven months, had initially been shown with dark, masculine furniture. Saft remade it in soft, creamy shades, draping the bed in a linen cover that pooled lavishly on the floor. As Saft stood up, his phone pinged. “Accepted offer on tudor,” the message read. It had been on the market for six days. Saft opened his laptop to show me mockups that he had made for each room of 860 Fifth Avenue. The living room featured two dove-gray swivel chairs and two floral-velvet armchairs; a low-backed sofa in a warm vanilla; two sideboards—one gilded, one upholstered in a nubby white fabric—and, for added flair, a white-and-gold changing screen. It was part Jackie O., part Lilly Pulitzer: a Chanel jacket worn with chunky costume jewelry. The vision was rapidly coming together in three dimensions. The wrong tabletop had been replaced with the right one. Only the details were left, but it is the details that count. Saft, not bothering to remove his sneakers, leaped onto a chair to place an ornate gold mirror over the mantelpiece. In the dining room, he stuffed faux peonies into a vase before putting it on a side table next to a framed photograph of Antonio Canova’s marble “Venus Italica.” The sculpture is on display at the Met; you could stroll up the Avenue and see the real thing. “Perfect,” Saft said. “Now we’re Upper East Side.” “It never ceases to amaze me how much wealth there is in the city,” Saft told me the next day. We were back at 860 Fifth Avenue, lounging in the gray swivel chairs as if we owned the place. “It’s fascinating being in this world, being with these people, because it’s the exact opposite of what I grew up with.” Saft comes from Levittown, Long Island, the prototype for conformist, white-picketed American suburbia. “I had a deadbeat dad. Never paid child support,” he said. During the day, his mother ran a rehabilitation clinic at Nassau University Medical Center; at night, she worked in the bridal-registry department at Fortunoff. Saft’s decorating dreams began early. “There was a hole under the box spring of my bed where I used to hide my mom’s interior-design magazines,” he recalled. “Little boys in the eighties did not read Better Homes and Gardens.” On his fourteenth birthday, Saft walked two miles to a McDonald’s in the town of East Meadow and applied for a job. “I’ve worked ever since,” he said. Though he was stationed at the fryer, Saft organized the stockroom on his own time, separating sauces from Happy Meal toys. Impressed, his manager eventually promoted him to the drive-through window—“the most glorious,” Saft said. “You’ve got a headset on, like Madonna on the Blond Ambition tour.” Saft considers his time at McDonald’s to be crucial to his success as a stager. “It’s all systems and process,” he said. Last year, Staged to Sell worked on more than a hundred and thirty properties around the city; aesthetic sense is nothing without a firm grasp of logistics. To be able to set up a town house in a single day, you must develop a foolproof method for properly loading a moving truck. (The rugs go in last so that they can be the first things out.) To speed up the hanging of art, it helps to write down the distance between a picture frame’s D-rings, so you don’t need to measure each time. Tricks like these can be taught to employees—Saft now has twelve—just as he was once taught how to expedite orders and scrub grease off a grill. He still has his striped shirt and red clip-on tie. Saft put himself through Northeastern University, participating in the school’s co-op program, which allows students to alternate between studying on campus and working in a field of interest. He focussed on P.R. and soon found himself in Manhattan, where he worked with figures in the entertainment industry, including Harvey Weinstein and Scott Rudin—good practice in anticipating the needs of demanding people. Meanwhile, he said, “I followed real estate religiously.” After a friend suggested that he would make a good agent, Saft enrolled at the New York Real Estate Institute, then got a job at a firm called Citi Habitats. He was twenty-five, hungry in the way that twenty-five-year-olds in the city can be. “I need to get my ass to work and start closing deals,” he told himself. Agenting is a competitive business. A senior broker gave Saft the same advice that the stripper Tessie Tura gives the innocent young Louise in “Gypsy”: you gotta get a gimmick. “There are agents who are beautiful, talented Broadway actors who just get clients because everybody wants to hang out with the gorgeous person,” Saft said. “I didn’t have that.” Early on, he was tasked with renting out a particularly cramped unit at an old tenement building on West Thirteenth Street that catered to wealthy N.Y.U. students. “People would come in and say, ‘You can’t put a bed in this bedroom,’ ” Saft recalled. To prove them wrong, he marked out furniture dimensions on the floor in painter’s tape, “but it looked like a crime scene.” The landlord wanted to lower the rent. Instead, Saft asked for four hundred dollars to buy a bed frame and an air mattress. The bed frame fit. The apartment rented. Saft had found his gimmick. Saft began to develop a reputation as a hands-on problem solver. To refresh a dowdy unit, he would change out light fixtures or paint kitchen cabinets in Benjamin Moore’s Hale Navy. He started cold-calling potential clients. “I noticed that you haven’t sold your apartment after a year on the market,” went the pitch. “I happen to work in aesthetics and design. I think I can show you why.” Few New Yorkers respond well to such unsolicited overtures. “For every one you got, there were probably fifty that were, like, ‘Go fuck yourself,’ ” Saft said. He kept at it. “There was 342 West Twelfth Street,” he said—his big break. The apartment, no more than two hundred square feet, was filled with built-ins, old-fashioned medicine cabinets, and vintage signs. Saft fixed it up, photographed it, and, channelling his P.R. savvy, sent the listing to the press, branded as “Small Wonder.” Five outlets picked up the story, including Forbes, which featured the apartment as its “Property Porn of the Week.” Tiny homes became Saft’s signature. He himself fell for a studio in a third-floor walkup on Twenty-second Street and Ninth Avenue. A professional pianist lived downstairs, filling the space with music. Saft was thirty, living for the first time on his own, and the apartment became his testing ground for staging tricks. He hung wallpaper in the kitchen to imitate a tiled backsplash, angled a lacquered Chinese chest to hide a few folding chairs stored behind it, and switched out his black coverlet for a white one that made the bed seem less bulky. Then he called the New York Times. “He might be exaggerating a little,” the paper wrote of Saft’s claim that his use of mirrors made “the apartment feel as if it goes on forever.” Saft squeezed in twenty guests for dinner parties and kept his bicycle in the bathtub. When he needed a bed for staging, he used his own and slept on the floor. In 2004, a former product manager at Microsoft named Rich Barton came up with an idea for a website that would change the way real estate was bought and sold. Barton had already shaken up the travel industry with expedia.com, which allowed vacationers to book their own flights and hotels, bypassing travel agents. He had recently tried to purchase a house, only to become frustrated by the opacity of the process. Brokers carefully guarded pertinent information; there was no way to know the price that a comparable home had recently fetched, or to see how sales were trending in a given city or neighborhood. Barton wanted to offer people a way to look at listings on their own. Two years later, the site launched. It was called Zillow. Perusing real-estate listings has since become a national pastime—not to mention a collective exercise in sanctioned snooping and quasi-erotic wish fulfillment. In 2019, Zillow received eight billion visits. By 2021, when Americans, stir-crazy from quarantine, were desperate to escape the claustrophobic reality of their own homes for the dream of someone else’s, that number had risen to 10.2 billion. The same year, “Saturday Night Live” parodied the site’s appeal in a Vaseline-lensed digital short, called “Zillow,” which resembled a late-night TV ad for an escort service. “Real estate is your sex now,” Heidi Gardner, clad in a lace teddy, purred. “And our listings are just standing by, waiting for you to browse them.” Once, the culture’s dominant status symbol was the car, with its promise of speed and freedom. Now we situate our yearning for recognition and reinvention squarely within four walls. “When I started out, I would bring some bodega roses with me and move them from the living room to the kitchen to the bedroom when I photographed,” Jessica Buchman told me. The public’s constant exposure to posh homes on social media and television shows like “Million Dollar Listing” has raised the visual stakes considerably. “If you’re an agent and you’re marketing a listing that looks like poo-poo, you can’t post it,” she went on. “Even if it’s just a beat-up, shabby little rental, I’ll virtually stage it so it looks all West Elm-y and cute.” Saft knows the value of the visual. He works with his own photographers to shoot each of his projects from a hundred dazzling angles, creating seductive imagery that can live on long after a listing has sold. Saft’s virtual persona, like his embodied one, is at once polished and cheeky. On Instagram, he shares screenshots of coy text exchanges with brokers featuring the sweat-droplets emoji; a sumptuous image of an intricately patterned patch of inlaid flooring might be captioned “morning wood.” With a hundred thousand followers, Saft is effectively an influencer, and he acts like one, listing the sources for the items he has used to suggest to his audience that all this could be theirs, too. When he approaches a potential client, though, Saft told me, “I’m not really here to talk about how pretty I’m going to make something. I’m here to talk about how much money we’re going to make for you.” He comes armed with statistics: the number of days that a project spent on the market, the number of dollars it sold above its asking price. In the lavishly produced Staged to Sell look book, Saft includes figures showing his clients’ return on their investment, which he arrives at by comparing their profit to his fee. His services are not cheap. Saft works for a flat rate, beginning at twenty-two thousand dollars for a one-bedroom apartment. He estimates that he has helped to sell more than three billion dollars of real estate since he started staging homes, in 2005. It’s best not to underrate the power of pretty. When I mentioned Saft to a friend, she squealed. Her parents, Tom and Robin, had recently bought a Brooklyn apartment that Saft had staged. “I looked at the staging, and looked past some real problems,” Robin told me. Saft had done the place “in a sort of retro-Deco way,” she said, with semicircular velvet couches, oval mirrors on the wall behind the dining table, and “cookbooks that Tom, who is a cooking maniac, said he wanted to take home.” Yes, the bathrooms had to be redone, but so what? The apartment went into a bidding war. Tom and Robin won it by offering more than four hundred thousand dollars over the asking price. Next, they hired Saft to stage their old place on Riverside Drive—over the objections of their agent, who thought that virtual staging would suffice. When Saft finished, Robin said, “it was an apartment we never saw.” Their “dumpy” office was turned into an adorable children’s room with twin beds—“five and a half feet long, because it couldn’t fit a full.” Saft’s vision wasn’t entirely to their taste—“the art was terrifying,” Robin said—but it found its target. The apartment went into contract in two weeks. “We got totally hoodwinked,” Tom told me. “And then we said, ‘The only way that we’re going to sell our apartment is to do exactly the same thing that happened to us.’ ” A good stager needs good inventory. It helps to have an eye for bargains, to love haunting flea markets and thrift stores, to delight in cutting a deal. One of Saft’s first acquisitions was part of a Mitchell Gold sectional that retailed for eight thousand dollars; because the rest had been lost, he got it for three hundred dollars. At first, he stored his materials in his apartment. Eventually, he rented a unit at Manhattan Mini Storage—then two units, then three, then seven. “I would Helen Keller my way around,” he said. “I knew the arm of that sofa, I knew the back of that chair.” He rented a warehouse in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, but outgrew that, too. Last year, he moved again, to a twenty-four-thousand-square-foot warehouse in Brooklyn’s Industry City. One afternoon, I visited Saft there. The space was as vast as an airplane hangar, at once utilitarian and fanciful—a Bed Bath & Beyond stockroom crossed with a cabinet of curiosities. Employees moved about, pulling items for upcoming projects or consulting Airtable, a software program that Saft uses to catalogue Staged to Sell’s collection. He puts the number of items somewhere in the hundreds of thousands. Last year, he spent more than a million dollars on new inventory. “I’m getting better at budgeting,” he said. We passed by stacks of lampshades, all manner of vases sorted by shape and color, and a substantial collection of novelty rubber duckies molded in the likeness of celebrities such as Freddie Mercury, Elvis, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. An arsenal of throw pillows abutted enough foldable bed frames to sleep an army regiment. There were African masks and classical bronze busts, a vintage foosball table, and an impressive assortment of orange Hermès boxes, which Saft purchased for twelve hundred dollars in Palm Springs and uses to pep up closets at his fancier properties. At the back of the warehouse, Saft sank into an armchair decadently upholstered in sheepskin, facing a gargantuan painting that depicted the Devil tempting St. Anthony. This was his private nook, the makeshift office where he keeps his special treasures. “I often buy things that have a personal resonance, because what I found is that they resonate with someone else,” he told me. For spiritual as well as aesthetic reasons, he likes to mix his own possessions into his staging work. A well-loved leather club chair appeared at 120 Prospect Park West; in a Chelsea apartment that featured an eighties-style glass-brick wall, he hung a poster from the French release of “Desperately Seeking Susan,” the twin of one that he keeps in his own home. I wanted to know about Saft’s view of perfection. If the harsh physical ideals of the fashion world have created a kind of ambient body dysmorphia, our non-stop exposure to absurdly neat, expensively decorated spaces can seem to have the same effect on our sense of what is normal in the home. The tide, however, may be turning. Minimalism is on the wane; TikTok is awash in videos celebrating the concept of “intentional clutter.” “Sometimes I’m in someone’s home where you could tell they’re a perfectionist, and everything feels perfect, and you’re supposed to sit perfectly,” Saft said. “It feels uncomfortable, yes?” He is drawn to designers, such as the interior stylist Colin King, who seek to instill a space with a kind of wabi-sabi messiness—the equivalent of a rumpled haircut from the Sally Hershberger salon. “The way I grew up, you couldn’t put your head on the couch,” he went on. His mother had a formal living room that no one used; she worried about spoiling upholstery that she couldn’t afford to replace. He added, “The right amount of lived-in is its own kind of luxury.” Staged to Sell now has two additional designers, who are tasked with creating Saft-style spaces that bear their own signatures. But, Saft said, “I still don’t call myself a designer.” In the decorating world, he said, “home staging is very much looked down upon. It’s like if you were at a dinner party and someone worked at Gucci, and someone worked at Y.S.L., and then someone worked at H&M. The others would turn up their nose.” This, too, may be changing. A few weeks after our conversations at the warehouse, I went to the Lexington Avenue showroom of the Italian design company Dexelance to see Saft participate in a panel on “the psychology of space” alongside Noz Nozawa, a San Francisco-based interior designer, and Jordan Stocum and Barry Bordelon, a couple who renovate Brooklyn properties under the moniker Brownstone Boys. I got to chatting with Sharon Stulberg, a broker who turned out to have come for Saft, too. “I think he’s got a chef’s-kiss gift,” she said. Her background was in licensing: she had put Elmo on Pampers. Now she was waiting for the right time to approach Saft about turning him into a brand. “He’s Martha Stewart,” she said. Saft, crisply dressed in cuffed khakis and sockless brogues, presented his work on 973 Fifth Avenue, the McKim, Mead & White mansion. Before he was hired, the home had been on the market for four years. Though the owners had renovated it, they had done so in a way that did not have contemporary appeal. “The kitchen was in the basement, which is not really how people live anymore,” Saft said. His brief had been to meld the period character with modernity. The screen behind him showed a “before” photo of the home’s opulent ballroom, its pistachio-colored walls inlaid with gilt molding. A pair of white bouclé sofas faced each other on a patterned rug—a bit stiff, a bit staid. “The owner told me she called it the Intimidation Room, because she didn’t know how to approach it, and no one ever used it,” Saft went on. “I thought, It’s a crime that you have this room in your house and never come in here.” The image switched to Saft’s version. The walls, still pistachio, were now offset by two large aubergine sofas by the designer Athena Calderone. Between them, a penny-colored coffee table reflected the rich copper of the ceiling. A pronounced “ooh” was heard. Even Bertha Russell, the demanding Fifth Avenue arriviste from “The Gilded Age,” would have approved. The apartment at 120 Prospect Park West went on the market, for the eighth time, on April 9th—a Wednesday. The open house was that Sunday. Dozens of people streamed in. Couples in their thirties, with or without a baby; couples in their seventies, retired. Sheer white curtains filtered the spring light. A fir-green velvet armchair, a pink-and-tangerine Moroccan rug. Offers came in. Sixteen days later, a contract was signed. “The truth about this work—like, why I dived into it at the beginning—is it allowed me to fix other people’s problems,” Saft said. He used to be a heavy smoker—a serious drinker, too. He got sober nearly nine years ago, and began dating someone who was in the final stages of adopting as a single dad. Their daughter is now eight. Saft has lived in more than a dozen New York apartments, most of them in Manhattan. There was an aunt’s place on West Seventy-fifth Street, and a rat-infested apartment that he abandoned after a harrowing night of gnawing. He loved his garden one-bedroom in a Harlem brownstone and the walkup above the pianist. A few years ago, he was feeling done with New York. He and his partner had broken up. He had been thinking about leaving town. Then he went to see a small studio close to the promenade in Brooklyn Heights. He heard birds singing as he walked down the block. The apartment was on the fourth floor of an immense nineteenth-century mansion. As Saft climbed the grand staircase, he knew that he would buy it. Recently, I went to see him there. “The last owner was here for sixty-four years,” Saft said as he ushered me in. “He died in here, and they found his body several weeks later. The fire department had to break down the door.” He took this as a positive sign. “I think there’s something really good about that, that the place held someone for so long,” he said. “They were content here.” The apartment was beautiful, serene. A disco ball hung in the bathroom. Everywhere were pictures you wanted to look at, little objects you wanted to stop and examine. Saft’s bed, with a gently undulating headboard, was in one corner, his daughter’s tucked into a nook behind the kitchen. When he had toured the place, the broker boasted about the bathroom’s marble flooring. After he signed the contract, Saft came back to take a closer look. “I was, like, ‘Oh my God, those are peel-and-stick tiles,’ ” he said. Before moving in, he cleaned the bathtub; paint washed off in big flakes. Even a magician can fall for a good trick. Talk turned to recent projects. Saft had just done Ricky Martin’s apartment, on East End Avenue. “How do you translate this person into a look?” he said. “There’s fire and passion. I just went all out.” 860 Fifth Avenue had an accepted offer, but the contract had stalled: so far, no sale. The market is the market. It was early afternoon. An hour before I arrived, Saft had flown in from a staging conference in Portland, Oregon. I took my leave to return to my own apartment, filled with toddler debris, tossed-off shoes, and baskets heaped with wrinkled laundry—unintentional clutter. Later, though, watching a video I had taken of Saft’s apartment, I noticed something that hadn’t caught my eye before: a few toys and pieces of kids’ clothing tucked under a striking mid-century-modern dresser by the front door. In the listing photos, they would have been edited out. But they made the house a home. ♦
