An Eccentric Victorian Stuffed into a West Village Walk-up

An 1880s tenement, reimagined in the Victorian style of the era’s upper crust.
Photo: Daniel Osborne

In 1998, Brian Coleman and his partner bought a teensy former tenement apartment on West 10th Street — an ideal pied-à-terre for a couple from Seattle looking for a place to throw down their suitcases. At least, that was the plan. Coleman ended up spending a decade and thousands of dollars stripping paint, sourcing antiques, and wallpapering or trompe l’oeil–ing every square inch. “You’d think with a small 350-square-foot space, How much can you get in?” says Coleman, who is now selling after nearly 30 years. “But there’s a lot you can do with it.”

Every living room needs a mouse with a pizza.
Photo: Adriane Quinlan

And Coleman did a lot. The building dates to the 1880s, when the upper crust was embracing the Victorian aesthetic movement with its maximalist parlors stuffed with spindly furnishings, gilt frames, and pattern-on-pattern-on-pattern. In the living room, Coleman added gold paint to an original marble fireplace, stained wood floors a deeper shade of brown, and took modern glass out of the window frames in favor of wavy antique panes. Crown moldings were painted a deep green, and so was wainscoting, designed to frame panels of 1890s linoleum. At auction, he bought a pair of gold silk curtains that had been shown at the Japanese pavilion of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, then moved to one of Teddy Roosevelt’s offices, and flew in his favorite draper to fit them perfectly. Then there’s the ceiling, where a trompe l’oeil painter put in a pattern of sunbursts modeled after a Minton tile. On a corner of a built-in settee just off the fireplace, Coleman asked for painted grotesques, modeled after some he had spotted in a British sanatorium, then added a realistic painting of a mouse-size mouse eating a few crumbs of pizza. “The main thing was to make it fun and whimsical,” says Coleman. “I am a firm believer in Victorian excess.”

The furnished living room with Roosevelt’s curtains.
Photo: William Wright

A psychiatrist by profession, Coleman spent the 1990s immersed in splendorous antiques as he slowly turned his 1906 Arts and Crafts–style home in Seattle into a pseudo-Victorian, eventually adding a turret painted with the phrase Quo Amplius Eo Amplius, or “More is More.” The home is now a local landmark, and Coleman’s obsession turned into a side gig editing Old House Journal. He has since written 23 books on the decorative arts — a job that has taken him from a French château owned by a family firm that makes the world’s finest linens to Sedona, where he’s now photographing mansions for his next book. “It’s a very dangerous profession,” he jokes. “You see all these beautiful homes and you start wanting what they have for yourself.”

In New York, trips to the Chelsea Flea turned up a 1920s stove with a trompe l’oeil green marble finish and a brass butler’s sink. They ended up in the small kitchen, where Victorian drawer pulls and knobs elevate modern wood cabinets, framed by Sanderson wallpaper. The microwave is hidden by double doors framing tiny portraits of William Shakespeare and Lord Byron. And the ceiling isn’t pressed tin; it’s historically accurate copper, which Coleman found to be too shiny. So he had it glazed with a thin sage green. “These are things you do not see at any price point,” says his broker, Taylor Bos, who pointed to about a dozen other examples of Coleman’s obsessive details: outlets with hammered-copper plates, a sink from a Victorian schoolhouse, 1870s door hinges with teensy pagoda finials that swing open to show a Japanese geisha and her paramour. Above the bedroom door, a rectangular glass transom window centers on a rondelle of stained glass carved to show a finch on a branch. And then Bos jiggles a brass pole and the window lifts open like magic — or, rather, like transom windows were designed to flip open, before we sealed them shut or pulled them out completely.

Tours of the small space have lasted as long as 45 minutes. “The longer you’re here, the more you pick up on things,” says Bos. On the way out, he shows an antique peephole, which swings to the side to reveal a trompe l’oeil eye staring back, then closes the door and demonstrates how to use the doorbell. It twists, like a key in a lock, and makes a bell-like clang. “I just love that,” he says.

The Irish phrase “The Hinges of Friendship Never Rust” is painted around the living-room ceiling in a style meant to mimic the Godfrey Sykes tiles in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s dining hall.
Photo: Daniel Osborne

The windows between rooms are a feature of tenements, where landlords were forced to improve airflow. The unit had the transom windows and original walls when Coleman first saw it — a rarity.
Photo: Daniel Osborne

The ceiling is pressed copper with a green glaze. The 1920s stove was restored and now has a working gas range and electric oven. The painted glass depicting Shakespeare and Byron hides a microwave.
Photo: Daniel Osborne

A built-in bench modeled on one that Coleman saw in a museum show of decorative arts from the Arts and Crafts movement, which overlaps with the Victorian aesthetic movement.
Photo: Daniel Osborne

The bedroom. Coleman replaced a modern accordion door with an arched antique door.
Photo: Daniel Osborne

Paintings by the artist Candace Cole fill the back bedroom walls and the door of the bathroom. The Victorians considered storks to be symbols of good luck, Coleman says, and put them throughout.
Photo: Daniel Osborne

The 1870s door hinge to the bathroom shows a scene from Japan and has finials carved to look like spinning pagodas.
Photo: Adriane Quinlan

Victorian tile of sunflowers in the shower stall are surrounded by hand-cut mosaic, inspired by the city’s subway stations. “But a clean subway station,” he says.
Photo: Daniel Osborne

A schoolhouse sink designed for a tiny corner and an antique corner cabinet.
Photo: Daniel Osborne

Sanderson wallpaper in the kitchen.
Photo: Adriane Quinlan

Gold-leaf foil backs a glass cabinet with painted portraits of William Shakespeare and Lord Byron and antique hardware. It hides a microwave.
Photo: Adriane Quinlan