Budget Breakdown: How an "SNL" Prop Master and an Architect Refreshed Their Brooklyn Flat for $128K

When they started looking to buy an apartment a few years ago, Brooklyn residents Graci Mills and Andrew Keck knew a space that required a renovation would help them get their dream home within their budget. "We wanted something that we could tear into pieces," Graci says. This led them to a dated two-bedroom railroad apartment in a pre-war building in Bed-Stuy. It became an exercise in updating a fairly typical plan into something more livable and distinct for about $175 per square foot.

The 725-square-foot apartment’s layout—a fourth-story, floor-through unit with bedrooms on either end and a dimly-lit kitchen and living area in the heart of the plan—is typical for older multifamily buildings in New York. While it was a generic space most recently renovated around 2010 with low-cost finishes, it had redeeming details including arched windows and nine-foot-tall ceilings plus its top-floor location with northern and southern exposures meant good natural light and cross ventilation.

The challenge for Graci, who is the founder of the architecture firm Go Bang! Studio, was making the whole space feel bright and cohesive without sacrificing privacy. What she didn’t want to do was turn it into a studio; walls were a must. "We needed the space to be super flexible for different uses, and that includes hosting, working from home, having an argument—whatever," she says. The apartment is around 45 feet long and Graci conceived of it as one continuous space that transitions from a public zone toward the street-facing side to private quarters in the back.