“We were never supposed to live here,” says Chelsea Redick, sinking into a curved sofa covered in a creamy Pierre Frey linen in the Dumbo duplex she and her husband JJ, All-Star NBA veteran, new New Orleans Pelican, and sometime podcast host, share with their sons, Knox, 5, and Kai, 3. Since the couple met during JJ’s rookie year with the Orlando Magic in 2006, they have resided in a whopping 14 residences across six cities. Think of it as a high-stakes game of musical chairs where you follow the basketball to the best contract.

So in 2015 when the Redicks initially started apartment hunting in New York City, they were just looking for a pied-à-terre—somewhere to put their feet up in the off-season. JJ was playing for the Los Angeles Clippers at the time, with no idea where he’d land next. They had recently welcomed their first child and wanted to be closer to their families on the East Coast. During a series of trips to New York for away games and the All-Star weekend, they pounded the pavement touring properties across downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn. “For whatever reason, we liked Dumbo,” says JJ, perched on a midcentury Marco Zanuso chair, his casual jeans and T-shirt revealing a tattoo sleeve that’s in refreshing contrast to his elegant surroundings. “We liked the grittiness of it and the warehouse backstory.” They put a deposit down on a penthouse apartment in a 1913 factory building with train tracks running through the lobby. It was still in the process of being converted to residential, so they leapt in sight unseen. A year-and-a-half passed, they had a second child, and the apartment still wasn’t ready. Meanwhile, Chelsea’s twin sister and her husband were now living in Dumbo with a baby on the way. Chelsea wanted to be closer to them. The Redicks decided to rent a place in the neighborhood, they enrolled their eldest in preschool, and she started settling in while JJ finished out the season in L.A.

In the formal sitting room, a sofa by Jonas upholstered in Pierre Frey fabric is adorned with pillows trimmed in Michael Aiduss for Houlès collection trimmings. The bronze cocktail table is from Porta Romana, and the 18th-century Chinese hand-painted wallpaper panel is from the Gerald Bland gallery.

Their penthouse apartment was still a construction zone, but Chelsea would stop by the concierge desk to collect packages. Pretty soon, she had charmed one of the doormen into sneaking her up to their unit. (She and JJ had still never laid eyes on it.) In something straight out of a detective playbook, they tiptoed in after 11 p.m., their iPhone flashlights guiding the way. “The second I walked in, I was like, ‘It’s too small for us,’” she recalls. “Then I made him sneak me into this one.” Not only was it more spacious, it boasted an epic 2,600 square foot terrace. “I did one lap, phoned JJ, and said, ‘We need to call tomorrow and swap it.’”

Their “pied-a-terre” was starting to look more like a full-time residence. Which meant the stock finishes it came with might need some rethinking, too. The couple called on decorator Michael Aiduss, whom they had been introduced to through their brother-in-law, to drive the process. “One of the first things Chelsea told me was, ‘I would love to live in a European apartment,’” the designer relays from his office in Montclair, New Jersey. A fair enough request, except for the fact that their industrial Brooklyn loft couldn’t have been further from a Parisian maisonette, geographically or philosophically. “It was a very careful editing process of crafting the spaces to make them seem more formal in their architectural organization, while understanding that there are two large walls of glass windows that wouldn’t have existed in a classical apartment,” he continues. Originally, the front door opened directly onto the living and entertaining space, with an unsightly soffit hanging overhead. “There wasn’t any sense of logic and alignment. When you create a classical plan, there are sight lines that are sincere in the way that a vestibule would precede a room, so there’s an elegant sense of passage.” The designer kicked out the wall opposite the long expanse of windows to create a proper entryway and continued the line across to the kitchen so more defined spaces could come into focus within the open plan: the sitting room with alcove bar, a dining area, and a kitchen and family room. They replaced the laminated stock floors with white oak herringbone ones and added traditional French moldings and archways throughout. “The idea was to create an apartment that felt like it had integrity,” says Aiduss.