Inside Actor John Leguizamo’s New York City Brownstone, an Antique Lover’s Paradise

“I’ve got a special business technique,” actor John Leguizamo jokes, “I like to buy high and sell low.” From the kitchen of his New York City brownstone, built in the mid-1800s and purchased in 2008 with the intention of raising his family there, The Menu star is all smiles. “[We] did an incredible gut reno that I oversaw every day. We did it in one year.”

You’d be hard-pressed to find a more New York couple than John and Justine Leguizamo—he’s from Queens, she grew up uptown. When they got together in the early 1990s, they were both living downtown. “As an artist, as an actor, the Lower East Side has always had a charm and magic. I was enamored,” John, who has appeared in films and television series like The Mandalorian, Moulin Rouge, and Romeo + Juliet, says. “Then we made some money and moved to [the Greenwich Village area], because it was easier there, being parents.”

When they first saw the townhouse, it was divided into three separate apartments. Inexplicably, in one, the previous tenants had broken the original molding and placed a giant black porcelain tub in the middle of the space. To get it closer to their vision, Justine dreamed up a floor plan and John managed the construction to implement it. “She has certain ideas, and I try to execute them,” he explains of their approach. “But all the plumbing had to be redone; the floors had to be redone. Nothing was small; it was all massive amounts of work.”

Once construction was finished in 2009, they moved in without a specific design concept in mind beyond John’s goal of “maintaining the beauty and structure of the building,” as he describes it, and a desire to fill their home with antiques collected to be shared across generations.

“We like things that are quality, that we can pass on to our kids,” says John. “There’s something beautiful about hanging on to things that have a history…. We like the eclectic feel.”

That meant the home came together over time, as a slow progression. “It’s not a project where we bought a place and had a decorator come in, and then all of the sudden it was like an [art] installation, ready to go when we moved in,” Justine says. “We’ve been living here over the years and as our lives have evolved, the house is evolving along with it.”

They collaborated with myriad design creatives, namely, Barbara Batesko, Nathan Turner, Lucien Rees Roberts, Leslie Rylee, and Harry Guttfreund. Batesko, of Bee Hive Interiors, whom Justine found on Instagram, spearheaded the dining room, while Turner, whom she first saw on Bravo’s Million Dollar Decorators, oversaw the living room. Turner began his career owning an antique store, so he shares the couple’s love of older pieces: “I love things. I love objects. I like a layered look that doesn’t necessarily look decorated. I just want to find pretty stuff and put it all together. They’re very similar,” he says of the couple. “They like the hunt. They like antiques, they like vintage, they like something with a story…which makes their home very personal.”

Justine agrees. When asked to distill their vision in a phrase, she says, “The most important thing is that home feels livable and not too precious, even if something is very fine and very expensive. I want to make sure that it feels cozy, that people feel comfortable taking their shoes off and relaxing—not like they have to be on their best behavior or scared of dropping something. [And at the same time, I want] it to be very beautiful.”