What $3,200 Gets You in Long Island City | NYC Apartment Tours

Auto-captioned from the film, lightly cleaned. Elena's words, not edited prose.

hi hello how's it going it's alana and welcome back to my channel today i'm bringing you guys another episode of buzzed in if you've seen my videos you know the drill but basically i love to film apartment tours here in new york and highlight people's style what they're decorating and talk a little bit about the local neighborhood and today's fun because we're checking out a new neighborhood we're checking out long island city so i came across nick we're going to be seeing today just on instagram rails i was just scrolling and i came across this beautiful apartment and clicked on his feed and saw that he lives in long island city and his feet is full of all these gorgeous photos and rails so i promptly slid in those dms i was like hey can i show up your apartment so i'm so excited to see more of his apartment and of course before we head on over let's talk a little bit about the history of long island city so long island city is a city in the borough of queens within new york city there's also a region of suburbs outside of new york city called long island they're composed of a bunch of small numerous towns so long island city actually existed as its own independent city until around 1898 when queens was annexed into new york city it became quite the manufacturing hub throughout the 19th century and then saw a decline in around the 1940s or so as did a lot of new york city when it came to industrial work and with time i'm learning this as an age-old new york city tale similar with dumbo which is the last buzz in i did once like the industrial market of that neighborhood starts to decline there are all these massive factory spaces and then a lot of artists start to flock to the neighborhoods it wasn't until 2001 that the neighborhood was actually rezoned from a industrial neighborhood to a residential neighborhood so within that period of time there are quite a few new yorkers who have moved into the area and are calling it now home also you may have heard of the long island railroad which does run throughout long island city and it's actually the busiest commuter train in all of north america that was interesting so before we head on over to nick's apartment i want to say thank you today's sponsor so thanks to betterhelp for sponsoring this video if you're unfamiliar with what betterhelp is it's essentially an online counseling service that offers incredible therapy with licensed professionals i've been using them for a long time now and i am a big fan of the services they provide it's so important to prioritize your mental health and doing something like therapy is a great way to work on that better help will essentially assess your needs and match you with a licensed professional you can start talking to somebody in less than 48 hours which is incredible there is a broad range of therapists to over 20 000 which i think is incredible because you know there may not be the right person for you in your local area and a lot of times offline in person therapy is traditionally more expensive and there's financial aid available it's available worldwide which is amazing and you can log on at any time and start talking to therapists so definitely visit betterhelphlp.com and you can start taking charge of your mental health and join over two million people taking charge of their mental health today also you can get 10 off your first month with my code and everything will be linked down below as well so thanks again to better help for sponsoring this video and now let's head to nick's apartment hey come on in hey i'm nick lowery and welcome to my long island city apartment our apartment's 3 200 a month it is a studio alcove though could technically be a one bed when you come in uh there's this kind of long gallery hallway uh with the bathroom uh bedroom and then of course kitchen and living space in the bathroom a kind of cool thing is any outdoor furniture actually works really well in a bathroom as well just because it's fine with moisture other things like that other than that nothing too crazy the rest of the space is definitely much more interesting down the hallway to our bedroom over here legally speaking it can't be a one bed because it doesn't have a window or exit from it but for all intents and purposes it's a one bedroom for our bed we actually have the floyd bed which is really cool we've had it for a few years now really really love it on the back wall here we actually have two of these floyd wardrobe systems in the middle here we have a bunch of alvaro alto stools that are really cool they work as a kind of a great side table as well as if we need additional seating if we have people over or whatever the case may be on top of that we have in isamu naguchi akari light sculpture we also have another one up here in the long island city neighborhood there's the niguchi museum and luckily enough we're able to buy some of the light sculptures from the museum and they look great in the space and kind of fill out everything nicely on our back wall here we have a really cool rounded mirror that's from cb2 it just kind of makes a nice like kind of framed moment from kind of whatever angle you're looking at it as well as since our bedroom doesn't have a window it actually bounces in a lot of light from the hallway peloton over here which is great my fiance actually won this in a work auction when they moved into a new work building which is great for me kind of going into the rest of the space i work from home on my end so because of that i have my desk set up here for my fiance she has her industrial sewing machine she's a menswear designer currently she works at kith but also does some side projects on the side on her end this really cool organizer that's from vitra it's in utensilo organizer it's kind of like all these little modular pockets which is great for like craft stuff general things and helps kind of keep our setup nice and tidy kind of going into the rest of the space over here we have our kitchen which we try and keep pretty simple when we were looking at a space we wanted something that had a large size like kitchen island as well as like a decent setup overall my baby which is a rocket espresso apartmento this is something i bought back in november so from a really cool online coffee distributor and company whole latte love one of the other cool factors that we really liked when we were looking at apartments and specifically this apartment was this kind of lower table addition that's actually on the island so instead of having bar stools we're able to have table height seating which is great because there's much cooler options and yeah this kind of starts to get into a lot of like my obsessions which are definitely cool furniture with it it's a lot of modernist influences throughout our space these chairs are really cool they're mies van der rohe mr10 side chairs these are produced by knoll this particular set was from 1982 though the original design dates back to the 30s these were actually sourced by studio studio26 who is another vintage dealer on instagram we really love looking at vintage exhibition posters because it's a really cool way to have original pieces from artists because exhibition posters were usually by galleries foundations museums for exhibitions going on on specific artists this hauntai one was actually from foundation might which is really cool so this one dates back to 1968 i believe as well as this matisse one which was uh also from a really cool gallery that one was in geneva from the 80s both of those we sourced off of first dibs this sofa is really cool it was a craigslist find from a few years ago we also have this gene prive potence lamp which is really cool so it's a swingarm lamp by avitra which is just a really cool fun piece it's great to be able to move around lighting my fiance is definitely the plant mom in her household uh so these are all her babies she collects a lot of more like rare plants so because of that we also have like a humidifier here for them just kind of like keep moisture and humidity up i'm sure some plant people are going to be like oh and then kind of going over to our coffee table in the middle here one thing that we always get comments about in our space either from friends or from people on instagram is our salam philodendron here this is a really cool candle holder that was actually designed by colin king and menu space this vintage ashtray which is by yoshitomo nara from 2002 uh that was like another ebay find and then we have our bookshelves over here these are actually another thing that we always get asked about there are actually three ladder bookshelves so they're three independent ones but we kind of uh have them all mounted together to create more of a wall unit we also keep our barcart kind of thing on our bookshelf which is a great kind of new york tip rather than having a standalone bar cart or whatever the case may be another thing i forgot to touch on is actually this uh pillow which is really cool this was actually a recent gift from my fiance it's a pillow by bodhi bodhi's a cool new york designer so you're able to actually submit uh image references and different things like that and then their team will actually do illustrations based off those image refs so we have like a vaz that we have with like chrysanthemums we have yuzu or betta fish uh tram from one of our trips when we went to taiwan right before the pandemic and then on the other side we have a linzer tart because my grandma always makes linder tarts and just like classic austrian super super good as well as like some playing cards some polaroids other cards just kind of like a fun little sentimental piece yuzu's a cool little betta fish uh we've had him for probably about a year and a half or so um but is featured on our pillow just as kind of our first pet together on the side over here we actually have a sori anagi butterfly stool another piece that's produced by vitra i think it was like 250 bucks whereas like retail on them is like nearing a grand so i had growth at a telecom startup here in the city i live in this apartment with my fiance ann uh who we've been together for about seven years i grew up in new jersey she grew up in sf both of us met here in new york we've been in this space for about a year and a half or so and luckily are going to be here for about two and a half more years we focus a lot on materiality so in our space most of our pieces are modernist or mid-century most modernist pieces are dark leather chrome everything else when it comes to like wood pieces or other things are primarily walnut or darker which matches like flooring everything like that we try and keep the material palette really simple and then of course books art plants kind of add pops of color to everything originally a long island city was uh very industrious uh so most of the buildings in the neighborhood here are newer than about 2007.

so it's a very very new neighborhood in that sense oldest one uh was like 1996 or so which is the oldest like residential high-rise around here which is crazy especially for new york city standards but because of that there's a lot of like industrial routes and everything like that so at the waterfront here by the gantry is where kind of the old gantry towers are for ships and everything like that as well as the pepsi cola sign because they used to have the bottling factory here very interesting place a lot of really cool art galleries and different things like that if you go up closer to astoria of course naguchi museum the sculpture garden the entire area over here there's also an entire block of pretty much all just phenomenal restaurants which is super important to us we are definitely foodies and also easy access to the 7 train going into queens for great food is always the best so always have kind of grown up around the city been in the city so always familiar with it if you don't live in new york it's difficult to describe how quiet the city is in a sense like everyone is kind of walking doing their own thing minding their own business and if you don't want to interact with a single soul you don't have to everything's accessible everything's open if you want to kind of go and do anything you have the opportunities to do that if you need groceries at 2am easy as well as just like how much cool stuff is constantly happening in the city you