Somewhere among the stuffed animals and fire logs, the bellows, copper kettles, hatchets and adzes, the powder horn, horse skull, snowshoes, sleds, razor strop, ox-yoke chandelier and crank-operated washing machine are Rob Schleifer’s 21st-century necessities.

“I ask people to find the refrigerator,” said Mr. Schleifer, who finally points it out: an all-but-invisible half-size unit. It’s camouflaged forest brown, like his televisions, VCR, radio, telephone, computers, printers and just about everything else in the fifth-floor Manhattan walk-up his family has had since 1947.

New York’s cliff-dwellers have long found inventive ways of customizing their living spaces, and untold secrets lie behind the city’s apartment doors. But Mr. Schleifer, a 61-year-old bachelor body builder and philologist who compiles dictionaries and writes esoteric articles about lexicography, has carried an obsession with the frontier past to new lengths. For reasons he finds difficult to explain, he has spent much of the last 30 years turning his one-bedroom rental on Avenue A near 14th Street into his version of a cluttered colonial cabin in the woods where young Abe Lincoln might feel at home.

His walls are painted to look like planks. His toaster, Crock-Pot, corkscrews, pencil sharpener, egg-slicer, and hot plate — there is no stove, but he cooks mostly vegetables anyway — have all been painstakingly rusticated with walnut and mahogany stain. Punching bag and boxing gloves, too. And makeshift clouds of wadded cotton hang from the ceiling.