THE BIG REVEAL

For a pair of first-time homeowners, a two-year renovation sets the stage for a leveled-up life.

- KATHERINE BERNARD

Wanting to live inside an acorn is a potentially, ahem, nutty directive to supply one's designer. But that's exactly what tattoo artist Mars Hobrecker brought to architect Michael Yarinsky when he and his wife, the writer and editor Coco Romack, began renovations on their two-bedroom apartment near Brooklyn's Prospect Park.

Yarinsky, who founded the local firm Office of Tangible Space with Kelley Perumbeti, decided to "make something that was a nod to the ask, but new and different and them." Yarinsky's starting point was not a hideaway but a conceit that marries Hobrecker's aesthetic preferences with the sociable pace of his and Romack's lives: a stage.