Restaurateur Keith McNally tells the story of his New York apartment

Like many immigrants, my desire to live in New York came from films. The strange thing about seeing the city for the very first time was that it seemed more like the films than the films themselves. Places rarely live up to expectations, but New York did. It especially lived up to its nickname: the city that never sleeps. It was 1975 and the subways ran all night, bars served until 4 am, taxis were available 24/7 and diners never closed. Not that I needed to have a coffee and an egg sandwich at 3 am, but knowing I could, helped me to sleep better. It still does. That’s why I couldn’t live in any other city.

In 1977, the year Elvis died, I moved into a fourth-floor walk-up in SoHo – a neighbourhood of cobbled streets and fire escapes. I’d never seen a cast-iron building before and was mesmerised. There was a particular old factory with a decorative façade I could never resist touching. It was hard to believe that these intricate details were cast in something as ordinary as iron. My apartment had a bathtub in the kitchen, which oozed rusty brown water for the first 30 seconds, and, at night when you turned on the light, scores of cockroaches scattered every which way. But, at $250 a month, I couldn’t complain. In the spring of that year there was a sense of exhilaration on SoHo’s streets. Everyone appeared to be under 30, wearing a tool belt and carrying slabs of plasterboard. New shops, bars and art galleries were opening every month and the streets pulsed with the spirit of approaching change. Three years later, SoHo became the capital of the US art world.

Forty-seven years on, two marriages and six different homes later, I am back living in the same block where I started out: Thompson Street between Spring and Broome. Naturally, the area has changed a little, but I can’t bear to hear people complain about change and I particularly hate the phrase: ‘It’s not the same as it used to be.’ Nothing is, and nor should it be. Ironically, I’m now living in a building that, 15 years ago, I swore would only be built over my dead body. When I moved into Thompson Street in 1977, there was a beautiful Art Deco garage on my corner. In 2009, this was bought by a group of developers, who planned to tear it down and replace it with something ultra contemporary. With 20 or so others from the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, I picketed the development. We stood about 50 feet from the garage, carrying badly written signs opposing the destruction of this wonderful building. Now, I have become a tenant in the very building that I opposed the construction of.

When renovating my new apartment, I went to endless trouble to make it look nothing like my New York and London restaurants. However, on entering the apartment, the very first words anyone utters is, ‘This feels exactly like Balthazar.’ Though I rent rather than own the apartment, this hasn’t prevented me from spending an absurd amount of money making it my own. And even though I think that taste is subjective, I also believe the opposite. That there is such a thing as good taste. The trouble is, those who use the phrase ‘good taste’ seldom have it. Because tenants in my building are forbidden from making anything more than superficial changes to their apartments, all my doing-up was done in secret. Especially the plastering of my walls to soften the sharp angles of the space. The renovation of my apartment was like something out of an espionage film. Carpenters and tilers would walk past the building’s unsuspecting doorman wearing suits. Once inside my apartment, they would change into overalls and work in total secrecy. I flew over two plasterers who I’d used in London and they would smuggle in the plaster hidden in suitcases. Eventually, the management cottoned on to what I was up to, but was so impressed by the look of the apartment that it allowed the changes to remain.