“I WAS down and out in New York,” said William Lee, remembering the early 1990s.
The kitchen.
The apartment’s interior was designed by Carmen Lenzi, a Manhattan architect.
The bedroom.
A ceramicist who couldn’t sell his work, he was embarrassed to ask his father, a Hong Kong businessman, for money.
Then, Mr. Lee said, he went to a bar for a drink and found himself “talking to some Dutch guys.” Soon he was helping to run their wholesale flower business in Manhattan. His workdays in the flower district began at 4 a.m. and ended around 1 p.m. Then he would walk downtown to Chinatown for lunch.
Along the way, he looked at buildings, including a six-story brick structure at the corner of Elizabeth and Broome Streets, with 18-inch-thick walls. (The building, once an icehouse, had been converted to condos.)
At the time, Mr. Lee was living in a tiny apartment in the Flatiron district, where he had to kneel to fit in the small bathtub. “My dream had always been to live in a place where I could stretch out in the tub,” he said.
In 1997, he walked into the lobby of the old icehouse and asked about apartments. Two weeks later, he made an offer on an 1,800-square-foot duplex loft. The price was around $300,000, he said.
How had he saved enough for a down payment? Simple. “I was making good money, and I don’t spend a lot on myself,” he said. (He was wearing well-worn jeans and a sweater with a hole at the elbow.)
These days, Mr. Lee is married to Angel Slay, an interior designer. Luckily, they said, the bathtub Mr. Lee installed 10 years ago is big enough for two.
Mr. Lee, 42, owns a Scandinavian furniture store called Modernlink, at 35 Bond Street. Three or four times a year, he drives around Denmark in a van, buying modern pieces, which he ships back to the United States.
Lately, the prices have skyrocketed, which isn’t entirely good news. “The chairs are all meant to be sat in,” he said. “I don’t want them to be super-high-end collectibles, available to only a few people.”
Mr. Lee and Ms. Slay have chosen a few Scandinavian pieces for their home, including chairs by the Danish greats Arne Jacobsen (at the dining table) and Hans Wegner (near the stairway in the master bedroom).
The apartment’s interior was designed by Carmen Lenzi, a Manhattan architect. Mr. Lee and Ms. Lenzi were roommates at the Rhode Island School of Design, and when Mr. Lee began working in the flower business, they exchanged promises: he would do the flowers for her wedding and she would design his apartment.
“The wedding was gorgeous,” Ms. Lenzi said. But Mr. Lee didn’t do badly, either.
Ms. Lenzi’s plan included adding a new stairway and a wall. “I resisted the wall,” Mr. Lee said. “I thought, in a loft, you want to take down all the walls you can.”
But Ms. Lenzi prevailed. Now Mr. Lee said the wall provides “just enough enclosure to make it feel like a home,” while breaking up the space.
“What happens,” he said, “is that you feel like you’re in lots of different places.”
Mr. Lee was equally lucky with his contractor, who had a three-week gap between jobs and agreed to devote that time to Mr. Lee’s apartment. He made it clear that he would walk away at the end of three weeks, finished or not.
To accommodate that deadline, Ms. Lenzi made sure everything required for the job was easily available. She also made use of several antique carved wood doors that Mr. Lee’s parents had given him. In Hong Kong, they had been hung as decorations, but Ms. Lenzi used them as real doors again.
Mr. Lee was as lucky in love as in renovation. In 2001, he ordered a banner for his store. “Something went wrong with the installation,” he said. “I called the company, and Angel came.”
The couple were married the following year. Ms. Slay’s arrival necessitated only one big change to Mr. Lee’s apartment: his closet had to be reorganized to make room for her clothes.
Ms. Slay, 45, was born in Mississippi, where her parents were sharecroppers, she said. She moved to New York to become part of the fashion world. She has worked as a model, makeup artist, set stylist, prop stylist. “Anything that’s freelance and legal, I’ve done,” she said. She studied at the New York School of Interior Design before starting her new career.
Mr. Lee grew up in Hong Kong but was sent to high school in New Jersey. He fell in love with Scandinavian modern furniture while visiting Norway as a young man. During a vacation from his flower district job, he decided to open a Scandinavian modern store in Hong Kong. It was a flop, in part, he said, because the Chinese worried about bringing bad spirits into their homes. Family heirlooms are one thing, but not someone else’s used furniture, which “could be from someone who had lost a fortune,” he said.
Although the Hong Kong store failed, from this experience, “I got the guts to start a real shop in New York,” Mr. Lee said.
His first store, also called Modernlink, opened in ABC Carpet & Home in 1998. After three years, Mr. Lee and a partner had a falling out, and Mr. Lee went his own way. He found a 3,800-square-foot space on Bond Street. The block was deserted at the time, he said, and “there were tumbleweeds in the street.”
His store looked out on a parking lot, which was later bought by Ian Schrager; it is now the site of 40 Bond Street, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, one of three glossy new buildings on the block.
Both Mr. Lee and Ms. Slay maintain offices in the basement of the store. The lack of sun is a problem for which they have an easy solution. It’s a short walk to Broome Street, where their apartment faces south. “It’s wonderful having all these windows and all this light,” Ms. Slay said.
True, scaffolding partly blocks the windows, as a facade repair project drags on. Ms. Slay said she had been nagging the condo board president — Mr. Lee — to have it taken down.