When Beowulf Boritt and his wife bought a prewar fixer-upper, he used all the tricks he learned in the theater to redo it.
It may well be, as the saying goes, that doctors’ wives die young, shoemakers’ children go barefoot and car mechanics drive wrecks. But if Beowulf Boritt is any proof, set designers would sooner hand over their staple guns than give short shrift to home sweet (and soignée) home.
For 15 years, Mr. Boritt, who is 46 but looks like a graduate student, lived in a 1950s-era Sutton Place co-op in New York, where he and his wife, the actress Mimi Bilinski, combined a studio and a one-bedroom. The building may have been postwar, but the couple’s apartment was anything but.
“I did all my set-designer tricks to make it look prewar, ” said Mr. Boritt, who added crown moldings, redid the baseboards and installed French doors.
Still, even the cleverest set designer can do only so much to alter the scenery. Two years ago, when a skyscraper started going up next door, “we realized all our light was going to be blocked out, and it became unbearable to live there, ” said Mr. Boritt, who has three shows on Broadway this season: “ A Bronx Tale, ” “ Sunday in the Park With George ” and “ Come From Away.”
He and Ms. Bilinski scoured the city for suitable quarters, finally ending up with a prewar fixer-upper in a co-op building four blocks from their old apartment.
No one is suggesting that Mr. Boritt is a shallow guy, but draw your own conclusions: The measurements of the living room were what first attracted him. Its long side faced south and was lined with windows, adding to the general sense of airiness. The high ceiling, black marble fireplace and the wall of bookshelves with a library ladder — just one plus after another.
The back of the apartment, though, was problematic. The master bedroom faced south, a waste of lovely light since the couple rarely open the curtains. The smaller second bedroom, which Mr. Boritt planned to use as a studio, faced north onto an air shaft. A renovation reconfigured the space, giving him the work-space light he craved and creating an en-suite master bedroom.
It’s so nice to have a set designer around the house. Partly to keep costs down, and partly for the enjoyment of it, Mr. Boritt refinished the floors and did all the painting, adding a bit of drama (because how could he not?) by matching the black of the fireplace to the moldings and door frame. He also re-covered a pair of side chairs and made a marble-topped cafe table.
“I’ d always wanted one, and looked forever, ” he said. “And then at some point I said to myself, ‘You’ re an idiot. You’ re a set designer. You know where to get the pieces for this.’ ” A supplier in Queens provided the square of marble. An ironworks company in Baltimore furnished the base. Mr. Boritt did the assembly.
He was also the problem solver in chief. He planned for a checkerboard pattern on the kitchen floor. When it turned out that the black marble tiles were 1/32 of an inch smaller than the white ones, Mr. Boritt used black grout to mask the size difference.
“That’s the kind of thing I obsess about at work, ” he said. “Being able to put it into practice in my home was fun, and it makes me happy every time I look at the floor.”
Mr. Boritt’s style as a set designer tends toward spare and simple. At home, his style tilts toward Victorian. “It’s personal comfort, ” he said. “Even though a lot of stuff is new, it tends to be in an older style.” Case in point: the camelback tufted sofa from Arhaus that was hauled up 10 flights of stairs in the heat of summer when it couldn’ t be wedged into the elevator. The deliverymen were well hydrated and well compensated.
“The couch barely fit up the stairs, ” Mr. Boritt said. “It was a challenge at every turn. I said to my wife, ‘This is never being reupholstered. It’s staying here until we chop it up.’ ”
Several pieces belonged to Mr. Boritt’s maternal grandmother, among them a Pennsylvania drop-leaf dining table, a Singer sewing machine table, some well-worn Oriental rugs and a pair of duck decoys. An iron horse she brought back from China in the 1970s, just as it was reopening to the West, sits on the mantel along with the Tony Award Mr. Boritt won in 2014 for “ Act One.”
The art, which includes works by Keith Haring, John Singer Sargent, George Grosz and Kara Walker, “is an expensive hobby, ” Mr. Boritt said. “It’s often people who’ ve influenced me in some way.”
Though there are some show posters in the foyer, it’s Mr. Boritt’s home studio that is the theater treasure trove. Here, a metal chair from the set of “ The Scottsboro Boys, ” there, the Belmont Avenue sign from the Paper Mill Playhouse production of “ A Bronx Tale: The Musical.” On the wall near Mr. Boritt’s worktable hangs the electrical outlet that was part of the set for the 2015 Broadway play “ Hand to God ” and was, apparently, so realistic looking that an audience member clambered on stage before a performance to try charging his cellphone.
Elephant figurines, including a pachyderm piggy bank, perch on tables and shelves. “I put them on most of my sets, usually in plain sight, but you wouldn’ t notice them if you weren’ t looking for them, ” Mr. Boritt said. “It’s a signature thing. It’s talismanic.”
During the renovation, he obsessed about the apartment. Now that the renovation is over, he continues to obsess, if perhaps a shade less intensely. “We didn’ t redo one of the bathrooms, ” he said. “Part of it was about saving money, and part of it was that the bathroom basically looked fine.”
Mr. Boritt sighed. “But now suddenly it looks dingy in comparison to everything else.”

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When the president suggests that many allies “owe massive amounts of money” to the alliance, he has a point, but he mischaracterizes the way it works.
President Trump castigated the leaders of NATO allies to their faces during his trip to Europe this week, suggesting that many of them “owe massive amounts of money” to the alliance. Mr. Trump has a point, but he mischaracterizes the way it works.
“ NATO members must finally contribute their fair share and meet their financial obligations, for 23 of the 28 member nations are still not paying what they should be paying and what they’ re supposed to be paying for their defense, ” he said.
Yes and No. NATO has a budget to cover common civilian and military costs, and some NATO-owned assets are also commonly funded when they are used in operations. The United States pays 22 percent of those costs, according to a formula based on national income. None of the NATO allies are in arrears on these contributions.
Mr. Trump is referring imprecisely to a goal NATO has set for each member to spend at least 2 percent of its gross domestic product on its own defense each year. He is correct that only five of the 28 members currently meet that goal, and they are the United States, Greece, Britain, Estonia and Poland.
No. The 2 percent standard is just a guideline, not a legally binding requirement. In 2006, even as the United States was increasing military spending because of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, European allies were shrinking their military spending. NATO defense ministers that year adopted a guideline suggesting that each spend the equivalent of 2 percent of its annual economic output on its military — but it was a target, not a rule, and not endorsed by heads of state.
Only in 2014, after Russia annexed Crimea and intervened militarily in eastern Ukraine, did NATO leaders meeting in Wales agree to the 2 percent standard, and even then they urged members to “move toward” that goal by 2024, still seven years away.
No. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama both pressed NATO allies to increase military spending. It was a regular theme of Robert M. Gates, who served as defense secretary under both presidents. In his final policy speech before stepping down in 2011, Mr. Gates said Americans were growing impatient spending money “on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defense.”
Mr. Obama raised it during a visit to Europe after Russia’s Ukraine intervention. “One of the things that I think, medium and long term, we’ ll have to examine is whether everybody is chipping in, ” he said. “And this can’ t just be a U. S. exercise or a British exercise or one country’s efforts.”
One way Mr. Trump is different is that he has made this a far more consistent and far more intense theme of nearly every discussion he has about NATO. He may have better luck than his predecessors at badgering allies into increasing their spending simply because he has made it the essential condition of America’s relationship with the alliance.
Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s secretary general, said last month that the number of alliance members that would meet the 2 percent target next year would rise to eight.
“Many of these nations owe massive amounts of money from past years and not paying in those past years, ” Mr. Trump said.
No. This is not a matter of members failing to pay dues. The allies arguably may have less capable militaries than they should have, but none of them owe anyone anything. “Europe may owe itself; it certainly owes nothing to the U. S., ” said Ivo Daalder, a former ambassador to NATO under Mr. Obama.
“If all NATO members had spent just 2 percent of their G. D. P. on defense last year, we would have had another $119 billion for our collective defense and for the financing of additional NATO reserves, ” the president said.
He is offering an estimate of what NATO would have spent had all of its members abided by the 2 percent guideline, but there is no way to recover that money after the fact. “Citing the amount not spent over the years is fine, ” said Alexander R. Vershbow, a former deputy secretary general of NATO, “but demanding back taxes is not justified and only alienates allies.”
“This is not fair to the people and taxpayers of the United States, ” Mr. Trump said.
Debatable. American experts have argued for years that Europeans can afford to have broader social programs that produce comfortable lives for their citizens partly because they spend so much less on militaries knowing they live under the security blanket of the United States. Overall, American military spending is 72 percent of the total spent by all 28 allies.
But the vast bulk of increased American military spending since the Sept. 11,2001, attacks stemmed from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which were instigated by the United States, not NATO. There is little indication that the United States would have spent less money in those wars if Belgium, Spain and Slovakia, for example, had spent more on their militaries.
Moreover, Mr. Trump has not argued that he wants to reduce American military spending. He has just proposed a 10 percent increase in the base defense budget.

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