Simply Marvelous

Actor Rachel Brosnahan enlists designer Zoë Feldman to breathe new life into an elegant Manhattan prewar apartment

- LOLA OGUNNAIKE

IT ALL BEGAN WITH a private message on Instagram. Emmy-winning actor Rachel Brosnahan—who rose to fame on the critically acclaimed The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, played Lois Lane in last year’s Superman (and will reprise the part in its planned 2027 sequel), and is currently in production on the second season of Apple TV’s Presumed Innocent—“slid into my DMs,” interior designer Zoë Feldman recalls, laughing at the memory. “I thought it was a joke.” It wasn’t. In fact, Brosnahan was quite serious about working with the designer, whom she discovered during the lockdown. “To stop doomscrolling, I started following a lot of home renovation and design accounts,” she says. “I was mood-boarding our dream apartment and, as I was collecting images, I realized that so many of them were from Zoë.”

For Brosnahan, who moved to New York to attend NYU and then decided to make the city her home, and her husband, actor Jason Ralph, who grew up in Texas, the dream apartment eventually arrived in the form of a classic six in a Manhattan prewar, the antithesis of the industrial duplex they were living in. Though it was in need of updating, “before we even walked through it all the way, we fell in love completely and knew it was ours,” she says. “It sounds a little woo-woo, but there was something about the energy of this space and the light and the way it made us feel. We pulled the trigger on it pretty immediately.”