Habitats: Private Lives in the Big City

4 Southern Shimmer: DANIEL AND DASHA FAIRES ON THE LOWER EAST SIDE (November 29, 2010)

3 1 4 Southern Shimmer Daniel and Dasha Faires on the Lower East Side NOVEMBER 29, 2010 3 1 Daniel and Dasha Faires, 20-something transplants from Arkansas, in their 375-square-foot apartment on the Lower East Side. (Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times) 3 2 To reach the apartment where Daniel and Dasha Faires live, you pass through the vestibule of a small brick building on Ludlow Street and head down a dingy hallway edged with grimy blue and white tile. There’s little evidence that anyone lives on this floor, or even that much has happened since this building was erected a century earlier. But hang a left at the end of the passageway near the trash can, and you’ll find something amazing. This is the Lilliputian home where the Faireses, newlyweds from Arkansas in their mid-20s, have lived for the past year. Both work in fields that demand visual flair—she’s a sales representative for BB Dakota, a moderately priced line of women’s fashions; he builds furniture and owns a design firm that bears his name—and together they’ve created an exquisite space in which a good eye trumps minimal square footage. The ground-floor apartment, which they rent for $2,000 a month, has just two rooms, a bedroom and an everything-else room. Their home is so small that when the Faireses were married last summer back in Arkansas , the wedding invitation instructed guests wondering what to give the happy couple to “please remember that they live in a 375-squarefoot apartment in New York City.” Yet despite the diminutive size, and though the rooms are dark even at midday, the space shimmers, thanks to artfully placed mirrors, votive candles deployed with a lavish hand, and incandescent Edison bulbs whose golden filaments glisten like giant fireflies. Gauzy white tulle curtains conceal windows that face brick walls and dreary alleyways. “To be honest,” Ms. Faires says, “it’s sort of like a cave in here because the only natural light comes from the backyard. But fortunately, we love the dark.” The Faireses are part of the seemingly endless stream of young people from around the country and around the world who make their way to New York in hopes of achieving glory or at least a more interesting life than the one they left behind. Although some triumph, many more flounder , unable to establish a personal or professional toehold, especially in a time of punishing housing costs and pervasive unemployment. Reluctantly , they return to the place from which they came, muttering bitterly about the impossibility of making a life for themselves in the city. But the Faireses were among the lucky ones. They had each other, they found work that suited them, and they have transformed a space that some people would find as confining as a coffin into a shiny jewel box. S O U T H E R N S H I M M E R 3 3 The two have been a couple ever since they were set up, sort of, for their high school homecoming dance in 1999. “I would say we hit the ground running,” Mr. Faires says. Not that the relationship didn’t have its moments. “In the beginning,” he recalls, “we fought like cats and dogs. We’ve been together for 11 years, and we still fight like we’re 15.” By 2006, they had made their way to a fifth-floor walk-up in Hoboken , New Jersey, on the other side of the Hudson River, and within a couple of years, to New York. While their current apartment could be tucked into their old bedroom in Hoboken and many people would balk at the rent, Mr. Faires regards their home as a find. The location is a major draw, especially for someone like him, who uses wood salvaged from the street to build his furniture and for whom the Lower East Side is an ideal hunting ground.“And this apartment offers so much,” his wife says. “The exposed brick walls, the high ceilings, the wood and marble floors. The ambience was here even before we moved in.” Ambience there was to spare. And the Faireses added considerable dollops of their own, starting with the chalkboard that covers an entire wall. Mr. Faires, who created the board using matte black paint, describes it as “very fun and very durable,” and everyone...