When Laverne Cox steps foot into her luxurious New York City apartment, she can finally exhale. Inside the 634-square-foot studio that the Emmy-nominated actor, producer, and advocate calls home, she feels fully embraced. Even though the Manhattan spot isn’t the first small space that she’s ever lived in, it marks the first apartment that Cox owns—and it feels right at this stage in her life.
“There’s something really cool about things being scaled back,” she says over a Zoom call from a seat at her glossy onyx table. “You can’t have clutter here. I’m more mindful of throwing things out and cleaning up after myself when I’m here.... You have to let go of a lot of stuff. There’s something beautiful about simplifying your life.”
Cox’s realtor found the property in 2020 while the actor was in town shooting Inventing Anna, the popular Netflix series created and produced by Shonda Rhimes about a real-life fake heiress. Apparently, he had a strong feeling that Cox would respond to the building—and evidently, that hunch was correct. “We looked at maybe 15 places, and this was the last one,” Cox recalls. “It’s an emotional thing; you walk in and you feel the space. You just know.”
What really sold her on the apartment was the location of the building, but the bones were so good that Cox didn’t anticipate doing a gut renovation. In fact, she passed on other places that seemed like big fixer-upper projects. But ever since she started watching small-space videos on YouTube years ago, she’s been fixated on the Pivot Apartment, a modular layout concept designed by architect and small-space expert Robert Garneau from Architecture Workshop PC. So when the opportunity presented itself to reconfigure the layout, Cox hired Garneau for the job.
The entire renovation has taken a full year to complete, but Cox has been sharing every phase of the process on her YouTube channel. “Part of me wanting to document on YouTube was about being like, ‘Hopefully people can get ideas about what they can do with their small spaces and make [them] a little more luxurious,’” she explains. “There’s creative ways that people can make it work, especially if you live in a place like New York where it’s really expensive.”
Watch her YouTube channel video down below
Written by Sydney Gore
This article originally appeared on Architectural Digest US
