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New York City’s vaunted Penn South development is almost impossible to get into, so when the Kruminses did, they wasted no time making their unit their own.
Welcome to How They Pulled It Off, where we take a close look at one particularly challenging aspect of a home design and get the nitty-gritty details about how it became a reality.
"The before pictures are quite dreary," Eddie Krumins says of the apartment he shares with his mother, Solveiga. That might be hard to believe, given how not-dreary their home is today, covered in color and patterns: bright orange furniture popping against a matte-black floor; floral pink wallpaper wrapping two walls. But as the Kruminses’ former neighbor, I know how long they’ve been working to make their place into what it is today and how hard-won is the sense of joy pervading their home.
Solveiga Krumins and her son Eddie share a two-bedroom in Penn South, an affordable housing cooperative complex in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood. Eddie had been a designer working in the city with stellar clients like Maurice Gibb and his wife Yvonne ("I did their home in the Bahamas. Really tacky people. So fucking sweet," he says) before a neurological injury disrupted his life and he moved back in with his parents in Florida. The mother and son eventually moved back to New York, where Eddie used his design skills to transform their generic kitchen, living room, and entryway with unfettered color, textures, and patterns. The teak oval dining room table and chairs are from Dyrlund. The fabric for the blue-green paillette sequin curtains is from Etsy.
Photo: Seth Caplan
About a year ago, Eddie and Solveiga moved into Penn South, a massive affordable housing complex of high-rise brick buildings in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood that opened in 1962. The two have had peripatetic lives, thanks partially to Eddie’s late father, who worked for the U.S. army and moved the family around France and Germany. Eddie and Solveiga have lived together as adults since 2002, when Eddie had a major accident that left him severely neurologically impaired, and he was unable to live alone in his Florida home. "She moved in, and that’s the way it stayed," Eddie says. "And then we became friends." Eddie’s father joined them in their home, but the Sunshine State wasn’t the right fit for mother and son. ("She hated Florida," Eddie says.) After Eddie began his recovery and his father died, the two eventually moved to New York City, where Solveiga had gone to school and Eddie had worked as an interior designer in the 1980s and ’90s.
Before: The living room prior to the renovation.
Courtesy Eddie Krumins
"Part of my deal after we moved back here was that I would work very hard to make the rest of Solveiga’s life as easy as possible," Eddie says. "Part of that is having a nice room for her to live in, security, friends, making sure she gets out and around." They first landed on the fifth-floor walk-up of a rent-stabilized Little Italy tenement, where I met them. But Penn South, with its vibrant community and elevators, is a much better fit. After getting a high placement in a lottery to enter the waiting list for the income-restricted development, they were able to get in.
Even so, they still had to make the "dreary" two-bedroom more delightful—and on a tight budget.
Penn South emerged from an urban clearance project in 1962 and was supported largely by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union. It’s now an extremely popular place to live; it took about 11 years for Solveiga and Eddie to move in after they entered one of the rare lotteries to get on the waiting list for an apartment there.
Photo: Seth Caplan
See the full story on Dwell.com: How They Pulled It Off: A Mother and Son Bring "Champagne Tastes" to an Affordable Housing Project
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Read More
By: Jack Balderrama Morley
Title: How They Pulled It Off: A Mother and Son Bring "Champagne Tastes" to an Affordable Housing Project
Sourced From: www.dwell.com/article/penn-south-new-york-affordable-housing-renovation-e3c4524b
Published Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2026 13:02:18 GMT
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