This Design Duo Loves a Challenge

The house had 16 bedrooms and was shaped like an octagon. Built in 1895 on the North Shore of Long Island, New York, the 8,000-square-foot behemoth was designed by Gilded Age architect Stanford White as a country retreat for his widowed sister-in-law.

By 2020, it had been on the market for some time and was in foreclosure. It was home to no one, unless you counted the odd wild thing living under the buckled floorboards. Yet something about the place spoke to James Hirschfeld, a founder of Paperless Post, and his partner, James Green, an art curator at Yale University.

"It was a wreck," Hirschfeld said.

The two men acquired the place, paying just under $1 million, in 2020. Then they started reckoning with the triage required not only to resuscitate it but also to make sense of a dwelling with more acute angles than the inside of a kaleidoscope.

"A lot of people would have looked at the project and said, 'You don't have $8 million to fix this,'" Hirschfeld said.

He decided on a course of action adopted by other ultrawealthy people who have found themselves facing a design emergency. He hired the firm of Charlap Hyman & Herrero.

It started, in 2014, as a small outfit that quickly gained a reputation among cognoscenti. Now Charlap Hyman & Herrero is an architecture and design firm with 20 employees and studios in Los Angeles, New York and Mexico City.

The founders, Adam Charlap Hyman and Andre Herrero, are an oddly paired duo. Quiet and slight, Charlap Hyman, a 35-year-old decorator originally trained as a furniture designer at the Rhode Island School of Design, is habitually clad in black agnès b cardigans, owlish Oliver Peoples eyeglasses, black trousers, black Nikes and a Cartier Tank watch. "He could be 12 or he could be 85," said one of his clients, model and actress Emily Ratajkowski. Herrero, an architecture major a year ahead of his partner at RISD, is a Radiohead fan who enjoys salsa dancing.

Their client list has grown to include big companies like Aesop and Moda Operandi, but also the Santa Fe Opera and the Juilliard School. Recently, the Smithsonian Institution named Charlap Hyman Herrero the winner of its annual Design Award, which has been given to the industry heavyweights Roman and Williams, William Sofield, Michael Gabellini and Deborah Berke.

"After we started the business, initially designing booths for art fairs, Andre and I found we were suddenly thrust into positions of quite a lot of responsibility with people who are not messing around," Charlap Hyman said.

They routinely take on residential commissions for those who think nothing of footing the bill for a multimillion-dollar renovation. In all of their work, they devise detailed stories to guide their designs. "Adam is a narrative maniac," Hirschfeld, the co-owner of the Stanford White house on Long Island, said of Charlap Hyman.

After agreeing to do their best with a place where the plumbing was iffy and the plaster was cracked, Charlap Hyman and Herrero set about reimagining it. According to the narrative they conjured, this oversize Gilded Age villa had passed into the hands of the builders' descendants, who were queer.

"We're primarily world-builders," Herrero said by phone from Los Angeles.

Once Hirschfeld gave his blessing to the world envisioned by Charlap Hyman & Herrero, the team set about bringing the house back to life. Those involved in the work did not say how much it cost, but Hirschfeld described the budget as "modest."

"The house was built for a family with a staff," he said. "We don't have a family or a staff. It's a big house for two people, and it's expensive. We did not have a lot of money to spend. Yet what Adam has is this ability to draw on resourcefulness and creativity to make something magical happen."

To make his vision clear, Charlap Hyman assembled folders filled with hundreds of photo references, which he presented in hourslong sessions. Fanning the tear sheets out on the floor for the clients, the team edited the options to arrive at a storyboard. Then Charlap Hyman painted watercolor renderings of the rooms-to-be.

"The process is a form of collage," he said.

As in collage, Charlap Hyman's approach to design is evolutionary and layered. "We see taste as something that is not fixed," he said. "It's something you enact, and we work very hard to construct it for our clients."

His work is as likely to draw inspiration from "The Simpsons" as the austere interiors devised by Chilean arts patron Eugenia Errázuriz, a tastemaker credited with the axiom "elegance means elimination."

Charlap Hyman developed his aesthetic in college, though more in the library than the classroom. "It had all the periodicals of all the design magazines for all history," he said. "I must have spent a third of all my nights going through every single magazine."

Sharp-eyed readers of For Pilar, a blog he started in college and still maintains, can track his design deep cuts to those publications -- Domus, Nest, Flair and other now-obscure journals.

The blog's title is a reference to his mother, artist Pilar Almon, who is one of many creative types in Charlap Hyman's lineage and inner circle. His aunt, Carmen Almon, is a designer of metal floral sculptures collected by the moneyed classes. His father, David Hyman, is a toymaker specializing in plush animals. His grandfather is the arranger, songwriter, composer and jazz impresario Dick Hyman, who still practices his scales every morning at age 99, according to Charlap Hyman. His husband, Adam Eli Werner, is an activist and writer known for his 2020 book, "The New Queer Conscience."

Charlap Hyman is also a geek for objects, a man who obsessively peruses auction catalogs when he is not haunting the sales rooms of the Hôtel Drouot in Paris or sifting through hardware stores in Germany, Japan and Providence, Rhode Island. For a special insert to the debut issue of Cultured magazine, he created a minicatalog of his hardware-store finds, including medical grade step-on trash cans, Swedish plumb weights and oak toilet seats made by hand in England.

"At a moment when everyone is suffering from a copy-and-paste approach to what modern taste should be, Adam is original," said Ratajkowski, who hired Charlap Hyman & Herrero to put the finishing touches on her 19th-century brownstone in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.

Little by little, the collage of tear sheets and watercolor renderings that guided the redesign of the home owned by Hirschfeld and Green became a reality. By slowly transforming it from a Gilded Age behemoth into something that made sense for a gay couple in the 21st century, Charlap Hyman was establishing a connection with generations of his design forebears, women and men whose social and gender realities were often suppressed, concealed or -- when AIDS decimated an entire industry -- altogether lost.

In their work, Charlap Hyman and Herrero are "sprightly and democratic," according to Maria Nicanor, the director of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. "Adam is adding himself to that lineage of people who make things well," Nicanor added. "And their work is fun."

Consider a solution Charlap Hyman came up with for Hirschfeld and Green's Long Island library, a room that seemed a bit staid.

"The bookcases needed something," Hirschfeld said. "We wanted to add some kind of decorative element. I didn't know whether it would be tassels or edging or dust covers -- and Adam came up with this idea of getting a not-very-special Persian rug and cutting out the medallions to create pelmets."

The question, Hirschfeld said, was how to do it.

"With an X-Acto knife," Charlap Hyman said.

Those pelmets now frame shelves crammed with the couple's books, lending just the right ornamentation to the room at notional cost.

"The difference between what's actually good and what's priced like it's good is so wide," Charlap Hyman said. "As long as you're going to spend a bunch of money designing or decorating a house, why not invent and create things that you can't put a price on?"

At the start of the project, a broken-down piano stood in a living room. It was a prop for the listing and yet suggestive of the gaiety that must have filled this eccentric dwelling in its heyday. "It's definitely a house that makes you think of parties," Hirschfeld said. It was no challenge, then, for the couple to conjure the sounds of ice tinkling in crystal highball glasses and the laughter of guests floating up from the lawn.

After five years of design and construction, a version of that fantasy was realized when, in October 2025, the house was completed and the two men were married there, in a ceremony attended by 180 friends, among them the British royal Princess Beatrice.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Copyright 2026 The New York Times Company

This story was originally published April 20, 2026 at 10:46 AM.