In a Culinary Consultant’s Chelsea Aerie, Every Detail—from the Millwork to the Molding—Tells a Story

PublishedFeb 24, 2026 7:59 AM EST

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Living in New York City means resigning yourself to a certain amount of hauling—slogging to the subway through slush, trudging down the block with a week’s worth of groceries straining your arms, climbing five flights of stairs simply to reach your own front door.

Five flights is no small commitment—the equivalent of a daily stair-climber session just to run an errand. Yet when editor, culinary consultant, and consummate host Christine Muhlke came across a 900-square-foot apartment perched atop a circa-1898 building in Manhattan’s Chelsea, she didn’t hesitate. The year was 2023; she’d recently returned to the city after a pandemic stretch at her upstate house, and her temporary sublet in a neighboring building was about to expire.

The apartment, to be fair, was unlivable: ruined floors, oppressively low ceilings, decades of accumulated grime. Nothing appeared to have been touched in the many years the previous tenant had occupied it, and the rooms had devolved into a catchall for belongings—the super later confided that it took six months simply to clear out his effects.

Muhlke, though, looked past the layers of neglect. “I always say that if a space makes every hair on my head stand up, or gives me that mainlined-espresso jolt, it’s the one,” she says. This apartment delivered both sensations in spades—and the asking price didn’t hurt.

Among the friends she recruited for candid “Am I crazy?” walk-throughs was designer Lithe Sebesta, a longtime confidante known for her unvarnished honesty. Sebesta—whom Muhlke credits with “the spatial equivalent of perfect timing”—recognized the apartment’s potential the moment she walked in. Muhlke made her move, negotiating the price with the building owner. After closing, it took until 2024 for the co-op board to greenlight the plans she’d developed with Sebesta and an interior architect; to nudge things along, she won over the then-board president with bespoke travel guides, a craft she’s known for.

In the end, “that extra time was genuinely valuable, because it let us sharpen what we actually wanted,” Muhlke recalls. “The priority was a clean envelope finished in honest, beautiful materials, with quiet details layered in. I wanted this apartment to feel calm—the city is loud enough as it is. I wanted light, and I wanted my son, Max, to have a proper bedroom.”

Sebesta’s gift is her knack for quietly weaving the old together with the new. Here she started almost from zero, which freed her to introduce elements that would serve Muhlke better—details engineered to read as if they’d always been there. She layered in new touches with an original feel and a contemporary edge, plus serious storage capacity; after all, holiday ornaments, out-of-season clothing, and suitcases don’t stow themselves.

Midway through laying the new flooring, the duo caught a lucky break. Sebesta called Muhlke to report that the apartment actually measured 1,100 square feet—200 more than the listing had claimed. “It was like that fantasy where you open the medicine cabinet and discover a whole other apartment behind it,” she jokes. The windfall meant ordering additional planks—no small expense, given that they’d sheathed the whole apartment in engineered white oak. Above, they broke through the ceiling to reclaim another foot and a half of height. From there, they carved one of the rooms into a bedroom for Max and a dedicated workspace for Muhlke.

When Muhlke recently welcomed me for afternoon tea, I was struck by how gracefully the apartment unfolds as you move through it. A tiled entry spills directly into the serene kitchen, framed in cabinetry designed by Muller Van Severen and Inga Sempé that houses Muhlke’s far-reaching collection of ceramics and cookware. For someone who authors cookbooks, runs a culinary consultancy, and helped the storied kitchenware label Dansk catalogue its archive, it’s no surprise that this is where she lingers longest. The Dekton countertops, she notes, are virtually indestructible—letting Max test his own fledgling recipes without fear of etching or staining—and the wall-mounted pot filler lands as just the right measure of luxury. Come evening, she cooks while her son tackles homework or friends gather on the nearby banquette. (Her one regret: not carving out space for a wine fridge.)

This single unit had once been two. Today, floor-to-ceiling cookbook shelving runs along the wall between the kitchen and dining area, occupying what was originally the corridor linking the two apartments. Above the dining table, Sebesta dropped the ceiling by a precise margin and reoriented the floorboards to subtly mark the transition. In place of fussy, Parisian-style ornament, she introduced clean stepped molding and crisp window trim, then echoed the same detailing in the baseboards throughout.

The bedrooms branch off from here. Muhlke describes hers as akin to a snug hotel suite, thanks to an oversize custom headboard upholstered in Chiarastella Cattana fabric, a dressing area that also houses her washer and dryer, and an en suite bath. In the generous, refined living room, the walls are clad in custom millwork by Summerfield Fabrication and hung with art gathered over the years; a grand window with elegantly divided panes frames the city beyond, with a sliver of the Empire State Building visible in the distance. “I’m really just staging small conversations throughout the apartment,” she says. Around the corner sits her office, fitted with still more shelving, a custom daybed that lets the room double as a guest suite, and a cherished vintage Georg Jensen desk inherited from a mentor she calls her fairy godmother.

“What lasts is the things that feel deeply personal,” Muhlke says, nodding to pieces like her father’s 1974 Bang & Olufsen receiver, a set of Agnes Martin prints, a vase brought back from Bilbao, wooden nesting bowls from Japan. “Everything here exists because I love it. I’d rather own less, and have each piece truly matter.”

Settling in after the multi-year renovation took no time at all—the apartment felt like home the moment she moved in. Muhlke plans to stay as long as she can, though she knows she’ll eventually need something new. “This isn’t my forever apartment, because I won’t be able to manage these stairs indefinitely,” she concedes. “But I wanted to design it in a way I’d be happy with forever.”

Samantha Weiss-Hills is the managing editor for Domino. She edits and writes home tours and features, and she’s the friend who everyone texts for glassware, sofa, and sheet recommendations. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Alex, and their beagle-corgi, Elsa.

Belle is the in-house photographer and associate photo editor for Domino, capturing everything from home tours to gift guides, plus the occasional how-to project. She joined the photo team as an intern in 2018 and was brought on full time in January 2021.

Naomi deMañana is a freelance stylist and editor who has worked in the publishing industry for the past 15 years.

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