Everything in its place

American actor Bradley Darryl Wong and his architect, Jack Wettling, have together renovated the actor’s 2,900-sq-ft apartment. The New York home has shoes corralled into 32 wire baskets in a locker-room storage unit in the front hall, doors with stencil prints that are ghosts of long-defunct businesses, among other artefacts.

Bradley Darryl Wong is finally settling into his apartment. Not that the place, a ground-floor loft with a subterranean bedroom on East Fourth Street, is new, exactly.

Wong, otherwise known as BD, bought it in 2005 and moved in, sort of, four years ago.

But the settling-in part – the purging, the decorating, the home-making – well, these things take time, particularly if you’re a hardworking actor and single father constantly battling entropy or rather fixedly engaged in “the struggle to control my surroundings as opposed to my surroundings controlling me,” as Wong, 51, puts it.

On a recent morning, Wong opened his front doors (century-old bronze, from a bank in Philadelphia by way of the Demolition Depot) to two visitors, this reporter and Wong’s architect, Jack Wettling, and showed off a few victories: 70-odd pairs of shoes corralled into 32 wire baskets in a locker-room storage unit in the front hall; three spit-spot closets arrayed with armfuls of coloured yarn in clear plastic bags, tidy rows of hats and suit coats lined up like soldiers, all behind doors stenciled with the ghosts of long-defunct businesses harvested from the Puck Building nearby.

Finally, in a back room, there was a vast and curious piece of furniture made from old sewing drawers, yardsticks and reclaimed wood, built by a friend to replace the massive rolling wire bookshelf filled with DVDs, photos and books that had been Wong’s nemesis for the last few years.

He saves leather shoelaces, buttons and the thread and fabric swatches you get when you buy new sweaters and suit coats. He also collects yarn, vintage grease cans, 19th-century chiming clocks, yardsticks and old sewing drawers. He likes old plumbing valves and fixtures, vintage hardware and a good deal. He drags furniture in off the street. Things do pile up, he said.

East Fourth Street is Wong’s third project with Wettling. The first, a loft on West 55th Street where Wong lived with his longtime partner, Richie Jackson, a television producer, was also filled with found objects: pieces of Andy Warhol’s Factory, including office doors stenciled with Warhol’s aphorisms, as well as family treasures like a floor border made from his mother’s mah-jongg tiles. The second apartment was a larger loft in Chelsea, bought and renovated.

In 2005, Wong bought this apartment for $1.25 million  from William Sofield, the architect of Tom Ford’s Gucci stores, who had been living there since the mid-1990s.

The two men share a personal trainer, Rob Morea, who is also, conveniently, a real estate broker. They also share a taste for underground, underlit places like this one.

When Sofield moved in, he had excavated the basement room and found carcasses of sewing machines along with old sets, props and scripts.

He gave it his own decadent stamp – Wettling and Wong described it as a cross between a ‘70s disco and a Charivari boutique – with silvered walls, much stainless steel and a quartet of Warhol’s electric chair prints;in 2000, Nan Goldin photographed the apartment for Elle Decor. (Recently, Sofield recalled the day his mother came to visit and wound up in the Merchant’s House Museum next door.

Margaret Gardiner, the museum’s executive director, phoned him to say: “Are you expecting a mother, Bill? Because there is a woman wandering around the museum criticising the decor. It took Wong seven years to fully renovate the 2,900-square-foot apartment, because he and Wettling proceeded in stages.

Also, six months into the job, the contractor vanished and it took another six months to find a new one. The ceilings, intriguingly barrel-vaulted and brick, were covered in plaster, which was removed. The back of the loft still had its wooden skylight, which was replaced with a sturdier steel one. Sofield had enjoyed the sound of the rain on the wood and glass, but Wong worried about security.

It was an unsettling period: Both Wettling and Wong’s fathers died at the beginning of the project. Wong and Jackson, who spent weekends with him, camped out in four sublets during the first three years of the renovation. But when it was over, Wong began creating the sort of home life he wanted for his son. “I wanted to learn to cook for him, and I wanted him to like it,” Wong said. “I’m a single parent of an only child. I wanted him to have this sense of people around.”

The bright red Aga stove is no showpiece. Methodically, Wong, who grew up in a family that marked the passages of life with extraordinary meals, has been teaching himself to cook.

Every Saturday night, Wong collects a dozen of his friends – the same core group, give or take a few players, including the actress Cindy Cheung, whom he directed in the one-woman show “Speak Up Connie,” and Wayne Barker, the composer, most recently of “Peter and the Starcatcher,” now on Broadway – for an elaborate meal and performance that involves Wong cooking in the kitchen while Jackson gambols with the guests.

“Jackson has bonded with all these people in a huge way,” he said. “They are all theater people and they aren’t tolerating him, they are part of the show. It’s a big deal for someone like me, who grew up the eccentric in the family, crocheting on the couch at Thanksgiving.”

Even Richie Jackson, Wong’s former partner,is for the most part impressed with the home Wong has created. If only, Jackson told him, you could throw out 75 per cent of all that stuff.