It’s easy to see why Kay Lee and Jonathan Chong fell for their West 11th Street garret apartment. In addition to offering a living area with a 22-foot-tall ceiling and giant skylight, it bore the ghost marks of the previous occupants: for decades an artist couple had used the space as their studio/crash pad—and painted marble veining on the walls, a zebra-patterned faux rug on the wooden floor, and string-tied bouquet on the bathroom door.

Kay, a digital designer, and Jonathan who works in the restaurant business, had admired the thoughtfully succinct design work of BoND, the architecture and interiors firm run by Israeli ex-pats Noam Dvir and Daniel Rauchwerger—BoND stands for Bureau of Noam and Daniel—and asked if they’d shore up the apartment for full-time living. Daniel climbed the stairs to the fifth-floor walk-up and was charmed at first glance. “The original design thinking was to preserve as much as possible—it would be a classic Greenwich Village attic apartment with as-needed contemporary interventions.”

Then reality set in: the walls crumbled to the touch and pipes were leaking into the apartments below. The place was moldy and rotting. “There’s a gap between the romantic thought of wanting to keep it