The East Village Duplex Filled With TV Props

The living room. The swivel chair is from Design Within Reach. The base was broken,so Shawn Patrick Anderson welded it back together himself. “ThenI threw on this red fur to spice it up,” he says. He found the resin table at Chelsea Flea ­ Market and the rugs at ABC Carpet & Home and Craigslist.
Photo: Joshua McHugh

Shawn Patrick Anderson is a professional collector of stuff. Most of it is stored at Acme Brooklyn, the prop house he co-owns that lends objects and furniture to TV shows, film, and photo shoots. “SNL rents from us a lot,” he says. The rest comes home with him.

“This place evolved a lot with leftover sets,” he says of the rent-stabilized one-bedroom duplex in the East Village he’s lived in since 1998. The stage lights that go around the ceiling in the living room are from a years-ago fashion shoot with André 3000. The wood paneling in the bedroom is a souvenir from another production. The James Bidgood photograph opposite his bed? “I bought that off my pornographer friend Andy Fair.”

The spiral staircase. “The Keith Haring signed poster was quite the find at Mast Books on Avenue A,” says Anderson.
Photo: Joshua McHugh

When he first came to New York in the 1990s, Anderson would find furniture and props in thrift shops and on the street for odd jobs like building sets for fashion editorials and models for a children’s show, Between the Lions. He stockpiled enough objects from styling photo shoots that 15 years ago he opened Acme. It’s now a 40,000-square-foot compound in Bushwick. The duplex is reserved for personal keepsakes and then some.

There’s memorabilia, flea-market bargains, and artwork everywhere, including on the ceiling, which came in handy when he ran out of wall space. “I’m upgrading the art a little, but I still love things I find on the street,” he says. The vibe is “old carnival ride.”

Every room is painted a different shade. The bedroom is midnight blue. The kitchen is so densely packed you can barely make out the sunflower yellow of the walls. The living room is the color of borscht with a dollop of cream. At one point, he decided it needed another layer of surface decoration.

“You see this little bubble?” he says. “I took a blowtorch to the walls because I was looking for different textures.”

Every now and then, Anderson will part with a piece. But it’s rare. The leather sofa in the living room, a former floor model at West Elm, replaced “the most uncomfortable Danish-modern couch in the world,” he says. “I had to get it out of here. It’s at the prop house.”

The stairwell. “I got that for a hundred bucks,” says Anderson of a Jim Morrison black-velvet painting.
Photo: Joshua McHugh

The kitchen. Anderson made the chandelier. The table was found on 1st Street. “I don’t mind it being slightly wonky,” he says. “The signed Robert Crumb silk screen (top left) I bought in San Francisco.”
Photo: Joshua McHugh

The hanging bicycle. It’s also stored in the kitchen. The console is from Housing Works. The mural was painted by artist Michelle Murphy.
Photo: Joshua McHugh

The shelving in the living room. The 12-foot-long shelf was handmade out of discarded furniture and other objects, including salvaged chair legs and an umbrella shaft for support.
Photo: Joshua McHugh

The shelving in the bedroom. “I made this shelf unit during Covid out of a leftover wood with grooves in it from a sailboat set,” Anderson says.
Photo: Joshua McHugh

The Bedroom. “The brown leather headboard I had to modify from a king size toa queen size,” Anderson says. “The lamp is one of my creations. The long skinny guy with a black crown I found in the trash.”
Photo: Joshua McHugh