Bold Open Kitchen in a Long Island City Apartment

Interior designer Alvin Wayne opens up the kitchen of his Long Island City, New York apartment — a space that flows straight off the living room and treats a rental like a blank canvas for stone, steel, and art. When Alvin moved in, the apartment was a white box: incredible views, but boring white countertops and boring white everything.

Rather than accept it, he interjected personality — and he's happy to share the rental-friendly hacks that made it possible. The showpiece is the countertop, a slab he sourced with his fabricator and simply templated to sit on top of the existing counter like a tabletop. If he ever leaves, he picks it up and takes it with him. His logic is simple: why go without beautiful counters just because you rent? The rest of the kitchen carries the same reversible ingenuity.

The cabinet fronts are chrome contact paper — six dollars from Amazon, applied like a giant sticker, peeled off cleanly when he moves. He calls it the best six-dollar hack ever. For the backsplash he had a piece of steel cut to fit, continuing the reflective stainless look that flows back and forth between kitchen and living room. The original countertops elsewhere he left alone, deciding there was already enough going on. Alvin freely admits he doesn't really cook — his friends come and cook for him — so he treats the kitchen as another gallery wall.

A lamp from a San Francisco maker, a glittered floral piece by Memphis artist Frances from a series about buying your own flowers, and a colorful bust by an Italy-based artist all sit among the everyday supplies. To him, you make beautiful art when you cook, so the room deserves beautiful art too.

The visual bridge between kitchen and living room is a set of Basquiat skateboards — the art most of us can't afford, but the skateboards we can — whose colors echo through the bust, a mint green that recurs across the home, and even the Basquiat print on the frame TV. As he puts it, the art chose him.