When the textile designer Sean McNanney moved from Manhattan to North Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in 2004, the smell of borscht would often greet him as he climbed the stairs to his railroad-style apartment. The neighborhood is no longer predominantly Polish, but the four-floor red brick walk-up, constructed in the late 19th century, still has an old-fashioned feel and is an endless source of inspiration for McNanney, who is drawn to the timeworn and eccentric. One neighbor keeps a coop of racing pigeons — homing birds trained to fly in timed competitions (a bygone pastime of old Brooklyn) — on the roof, and when one of the building’s older tenants died about 15 years ago, it was revealed that she had painted every surface of her small apartment to resemble a traditional Polish dacha, complete with trompe l’oeil wooden shutters and a mural of dancing deer.

In his own one-bedroom on the top floor, the 41-year-old has also created a home that seems to exist beyond the confines of time and place. Dense with lavishly carved 19th-century Herter Brothers furniture, intricately embroidered Turkish textiles and a smattering of decorative objects — early 20th-century Wiener Werkstätte lace doilies, 19th-century plaster busts, framed 18th-century German wax seals, a two-and-a-half-foot-wide Victorian seascape diorama filled with coral and dried sponges — the space recalls the intensely idiosyncratic flats of New York’s creative class from the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s. Back then, in the pre-smartphone age, artistic inspiration existed largely in the form of stuff: the chintzy studios inside the Chelsea Hotel that Andy Warhol captured in his 1966 avant-garde film “Chelsea Girls”; the cluttered, carpet-strewn ’70s-era Bowery lofts of artists such as John Giorno; Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith’s apartment in Brooklyn in the late ’60s, depicted in Smith’s 2010 memoir “Just Kids” as a mélange of Indian cloth, frayed carpets and souvenirs arranged like “sacred objects on an altar.” Compact but impossibly ornate, McNanney’s apartment acts as a living mood board for his line Saved NY, which includes vintage-inspired handmade Mongolian cashmere blankets and pillows. Founded in 2015, the label is a follow-up of sorts to the tiny gothic shop of the same name that he ran in the building next door to his own from 2004 to 2008, selling antique furniture and clothing.

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