Stars, they’re just like us. Even a two-time Oscar nominee, it turns out, can fall prey to new-home anxiety. “I mean, look at this place,” Naomi Watts says. “Is it too big? Are we taking on more than we should? Maybe we should have stayed where we were? I don’t know!” And then the actress throws her arms up and lets out a lovely, nervous laugh.
Watts is standing in the entry hall of the Manhattan apartment she shares with her partner, actor Liev Schreiber, and their two sons, eight-year-old Alexander and seven-year-old Samuel. Oh, and there’s Bob, too. He’s the Yorkie. The journey to this moment has been long, twisting, and fraught with the kind of drama that Watts—who is in three movies coming out this year—usually has to cope with only in make-believe.
But let’s start at the beginning.
Fifteen years ago, when the British-born, Australian-raised Watts’s career was starting to blossom and she was looking for a toehold in New York City, she bought an apartment in the Financial District after seeing it once. “Not because I loved it but because of the pressure!” she recounts. “I had no idea deals here moved that fast. After I closed on it, I showed it to my mother, who is a bit of a bohemian—and a super-talented decorator. She walked in and said, ‘This is horrible. No soul. No character. It’s a businessman’s apartment.’ I was crushed. But she was right.”
Watts sold the place quickly. “You know, I should have kept it,” she laments. “Now it’s worth twice what I paid.” She settled in Los Angeles, where she built her career in movies ranging from Mulholland Drive to 21 Grams to King Kong to last year’s Academy Award winner for best picture, Birdman. “But then I met Mr. New York,” she says, “and everything changed.” Mr. New York, of course, is Liev Schreiber, acclaimed for playing hardened, complex characters in films such as Spotlight and on the Showtime series Ray Donovan. “We fell in love, so I moved here and we lived in his fantastic NoHo place for years,” Watts says.
We started our family and were quite happy.
Like so many New Yorkers, however, they soon found themselves desiring a certain precious commodity. “We knew we wanted space for the kids to grow—and for all of us,” Watts says. So they began The Hunt.
While Watts remarks that “with New York real estate, you never get everything you want,” she and Schreiber were able to create a duplex from two separate units—one had been an artist’s loft—checking off most of the boxes on their wish list. Then, shortly after they closed the deal, Hurricane Sandy struck, and the building, near the Hudson River, was flooded. For months they couldn’t enter the property, proving another rule of New York real estate: It will test you, constantly asking, How badly do you want to live here?
When the couple finally got back in, the place was a mess. After taking time to weigh options, they hired an architect but changed course several months later. Two years into owning the home, it was raw space. “One thing I’ve learned,” Watts says, “is when it comes to big renovations, no one gets an easy ride.” Ultimately they enlisted Ariel Ashe and Reinaldo Leandro, the duo behind the firm Ashe + Leandro, to design the interiors. That’s when things kicked into high gear.
“This project was design on steroids,” Leandro says, standing in the first-floor library/screening room, which also serves as a place for Watts and Schreiber to take meetings and study scripts. “I had drawings in four months, and then we did the entire renovation in ten. It was insanely fast. But fun. Naomi brought a great eye and taste to the project and was a terrific creative partner.”
Walking through the home, it’s hard to imagine that Watts and Schreiber had to compromise on anything. Instead it feels as if they got a rare trifecta: an apartment that elegantly combines features of three archetypal New York homes. The entranceway gives you the intimate, welcoming feeling of a historic townhouse, while the sweeping sculptural staircase evokes the drama of a stately uptown duplex, and the open yet private layout of the second floor has the urbanity of a classic loft. Throughout, robust design elements are balanced with graceful, softer gestures, whether the jewelry-like lights suspended above the brawny dining table or the floral curtains whimsically offsetting the master bedroom’s masculine blues. Indeed, the home seems to mirror the union of the broad-shouldered, intense Schreiber and the delicately luminous Watts.
The actress credits her mother with teaching her about great design. “From the time I was a little girl, she was taking me to rummage sales and antiques stores,” she recalls. “It was a terrific education.” All around the apartment you can see Watts’s input—in the rugs she bought in Morocco and in the bar’s high-gloss green paint (“I saw the color in a home on the Upper East Side, where we were filming Demolition, and fell in love with it,” she says). The cozy banquette in the kitchen is another touch she insisted on. “The dining table is great,” she says, “and the barstools are fine for entertaining, but I wanted a place where we could snuggle as a family. I didn’t want to make a showhouse. I wanted to make a true home for us.”
When asked about her favorite thing in the house, Watts blushes. “This will sound crazy,” she confesses, “but I lie in bed at night and think, I can’t believe after all these years in New York I finally have a walk-in pantry!”
Stars, they’re just like us: finding the greatest joy in a home’s most practical comforts.
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