Serving 1 community in New York City
Interior Design Firm in New York City
Full-service, founder-led interior design for Manhattan prewar co-ops, condos and townhouses, penthouses, pied-à-terres and Brooklyn brownstones.
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Est. 1996 · ASID & IIDA Members · WBENC Woman-Owned · 500+ Clients · 3M+ Sq Ft Designed
In Manhattan, storage is architecture. Get the millwork right and the apartment lives a third larger than it measures.
Interior Design in New York City
Manhattan apartments are among the most demanding interiors in the country, because everything competes for the same square foot. The prewar buildings along Fifth, Park and Central Park West — Candela, Emery Roth and their peers — offer high ceilings, herringbone floors, plaster crown and gallery entries, paired with a kitchen originally built for staff and closets sized for a smaller wardrobe era. Postwar and new condos offer better mechanicals and worse proportion. Townhouses on the Upper East Side and in the Village offer four or five floors and one stair. Penthouses offer terraces and setbacks that change every ceiling plane. Across the river, Brooklyn brownstones in Park Slope, Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill add parlor floors, marble mantels and a garden level that needs to be made genuinely usable.
Space is the constraint, so the plan carries the design. We start with circulation, sightlines and how the light moves through a floor-through or an L-shaped layout, and we test whether a wall is load-bearing or merely inherited. Custom millwork does the heavy lifting after that: full-height cabinetry, libraries, bars, banquettes, entry storage, bed walls, and closets designed around what you actually own. A kitchen in a prewar apartment is an engineering problem before it is a design one — ventilation routing, plumbing risers, appliance depth, and the location of a beam nobody drew. Get those right and the apartment feels considerably larger than its floor plate.
INSABELLADESIGN has been designing interiors since 1996 — full service, ASID and IIDA members, WBENC-certified and woman-owned, based in Little Silver, New Jersey, working across New Jersey, New York, Connecticut and Florida. More than three million square feet designed, over 500 clients, residential and commercial. Beth Insabella Walsh leads every project and stays with it from the first plan through the last delivery. In a market where the building itself sets much of the schedule, having one person accountable across drawings, board submission, construction and install is not a luxury.
What We Design Across New York City
Residentially: gut renovations and apartment combinations, kitchens built into tight footprints, primary and secondary baths in honed marble or limestone, custom cabinetry and paneling, libraries and studies, dressing rooms and closet systems, entry and mudroom storage, and lighting plans drawn around plaster ceilings and real ceiling heights. Townhouses and brownstones add stair, floor-by-floor planning, garden-level connection to the yard, and the restoration or reinterpretation of original mantels, moldings and shutters. Pied-à-terres get the same rigor at a smaller scale — for a place used forty nights a year, every piece has to earn its footprint. Furnishings, window treatments, rugs, textiles and art are specified and procured as part of the scope, with installation planned as a single event around the building's freight elevator schedule.
Commercially we design offices and executive suites, financial and family-office space, medical and dental practices, hospitality, showrooms, and residential building lobbies and amenity floors. City commercial work runs on landlord work letters, building standards, code and ADA review, filings, and a fixed occupancy date, with after-hours access rules of its own. The method is the same as on the residential side: plan the space, draw the millwork, specify the finishes, coordinate the trades, protect the schedule. We are an interior design firm and do not offer home staging — nothing here is temporary dressing for a listing.
Communities We Serve in New York City
- Manhattan, NY — top-of-market island borough
Why New York City Chooses INSABELLADESIGN
- Nearly 30 years of award-winning residential & commercial design (est. 1996)
- ASID & IIDA professional members · WBENC-certified, woman-owned firm
- Full service: detailed space planning and design documentation, custom kitchens & baths, millwork, furnishing, install
- Every project led personally by founder Beth Insabella Walsh
- Trusted by the architects, builders, and trades our clients rely on
- Sourced materials, custom fabrication, and finishes held to an exacting standard
New York City Interior Design — FAQs
How do building rules and alteration agreements shape the timeline?
They usually set it. A Manhattan co-op typically requires a complete drawing set for board and building-engineer review, an executed alteration agreement, contractor license and insurance certificates naming the building, and an architect or engineer of record for DOB filings. Approval can run several weeks or longer. Many buildings restrict renovation to a summer window between Memorial Day and Labor Day, allow work only on weekday daytime hours, require lobby and elevator protection, and book freight elevator time in advance. Condos are generally lighter but not exempt. We design within those rules from the start, prepare the submission package early, and put long-lead millwork and stone into production while approvals run so the construction window is not wasted.
How do you get more usable space out of a small apartment?
By buying it back from the plan and the millwork. First the plan: remove or reposition partitions that only exist because a prewar layout assumed staff and separate dining, widen an opening, and relocate a door so a room gains a full wall of usable length. Then the millwork, which is where most of the space actually comes from — full-height cabinetry to the crown, banquette seating with storage beneath, a library wall that doubles as a bar, a bed wall with integrated closets, and entry storage detailed to the inch. Add mirror and glazing where they extend a sightline honestly, and lighting layered so the room reads deeper. Done properly, a 1,400 square foot apartment lives like a much larger one.
You're based in New Jersey. Does that work for a Manhattan project?
It works well. We are roughly an hour and a half from the city and have worked across New Jersey, New York, Connecticut and Florida since 1996. Beth is on site for the walkthrough, field measure, demolition review, millwork templating, stone selection and install, and the project runs between visits on drawings, shop-drawing review, finish samples and standing calls with your architect, contractor and building management. We coordinate with New York contractors, cabinetmakers, stone fabricators, expediters and engineers as the building requires. Many clients here also keep a house in Westchester, Connecticut, the Jersey Shore or Florida — running them through one firm keeps the residences related without turning them into copies of each other.
Is a townhouse or brownstone renovation different from an apartment?
Very. You gain floors and lose the shared-wall constraints, but you take on the whole building: stair, structure, mechanicals, roof, facade and often a garden. The design questions become vertical — which floor holds the kitchen, how the parlor level stays formal without going unused, how the garden level connects to the yard, where storage goes in a house twenty feet wide. Original detail such as mantels, plaster medallions, shutters and wide-plank floors is worth restoring where it survives, and new millwork should be drawn to match rather than contrast for its own sake. Historic district properties add exterior and window review, which we coordinate with your architect and expediter early, since that approval path is slower than construction.