When Nick and Molly bought their co-op on New York’s Lower East Side in 2016, they knew it needed a renovation—especially the galley kitchen. But the couple, who had lived together in three different rentals before this purchase, decided to live with what they had while they saved up for the project. “We had Google Slides decks with a checklist for each room of must-haves and nice-to-haves,” Nick says. “We had a Pinterest board for each room to show the aesthetic.” Armed with ideas about how they wanted to live in the space, Molly started researching interior designers. In February 2020, they connected with Ahmad AbouZanat, the founder of Project AZ.
Ahmad liked that the couple had requests. “I first focused on the functionality of the space,” he says. “The aesthetic is about them—Nick is very into music and his albums, and Molly is very stylish—so I’m only going to present them with options that make it look fantastic.” The bad news on their timing was that the pandemic was soon going to hit, so they had a delay of game. Luckily, that extra time let Nick, Molly, and Ahmad tackle the entire apartment at once instead of doing it piecemeal as they’d originally planned.
