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.”
