When one door closes, another one opens. Such was the unofficial mantra of actor Jesse Tyler Ferguson and his husband, lawyer Justin Mikita, when the couple found out Ferguson’s long-running ABC show, Modern Family, was ending after 11 seasons. For Ferguson, the series’ end made it the ideal time to invest in a larger home in New York, as he’d no longer be tied to Los Angeles for filming. “I feel very at home here,” Ferguson says of Manhattan. “I was strictly a theater actor before moving to Los Angeles, so New York sort of feels like my true home.” And, with the couple recently announcing they’re expecting their first child in July, there was no better time to upgrade their East Coast digs than the present.
As Los Angeles is the couple’s primary residence, finding the perfect apartment across the country was no easy feat. But the process was made easier once Ferguson enlisted the help of his friend and former Broadway costar, Sarah Saltzberg, who is also a licensed real estate agent. She guided them to a new build in Chelsea, where the couple was actually among the first to move in. “We knew we wanted to be in a new building because we had previously been in a prewar and [now] we wanted things like central air conditioning,” Mikita says. Ferguson was also entranced by the sleek lines of the kitchen and the preponderance of natural light. “I like the idea of a clean look: You can’t really see where the refrigerator is because it’s all integrated. That was very appealing to me.”
But even though the two-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath unit was brand-new, there were still a few questionable design decisions that the couple opted to fix before moving in. Most glaring? “There was actually, strangely, no drawer for silverware in the kitchen, so we had to figure that out and add it,” Mikita says. And, this being New York, space maximization was crucial. “Every time we augmented something, we tried to do it in a way where we would add storage as well,” Ferguson says. “We were always looking for places to tuck things away.”
Mikita likens the apartment pre-move-in to a blank slate. “It was beautifully done, but we came in and added our personality to it,” he says. Helping to realize the couple’s vision was their longtime friend, set and interior designer Peter Gurski. “I’m a storyteller,” Gurski says. “I like to tell a story because of my background in films and television. A lot of the clients I have are people in a creative field and they have a sense of—or ideas of—what they would like, and I help them translate that and make a reality of it.” Gurski describes Mikita’s style as playful, and Ferguson’s as more traditional, but there is commonality. “They love color, if it’s well-curated. They love an interesting shape or design,” Gurski says. “They don’t mind vintage or unusual. I think they’re both, in their own way, risk-takers with design.”
