“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…