In an essay penned forDominomagazine’s Fall 2019 cover story, theGirlscreator, 33, recalls the memories she has of the house that she thought she and Antonoff would start a family in, as well as the heartbreaking moment they decided that she would move out, and he would stay.
Alberto Zanetti, courtesy of Domino
Dunham recalls that she wanted a place that was unique and had a feeling of “decrepit glam,” but Antonoff was “afraid of dust,” so they bid on an apartment that hadn’t even been built yet. In the interim, Dunham made scrapbooks of her dream home, carefully planning out every detail, from the wallpaper down to the pillow covers.
Dunham decorated their new apartment while Antonoff was on tour, excited to unveil the finished project. But when he returned, she writes, “he hated it.”
“He didn’t want to hate it,” she says. “He tried not to hate it. But he didn’t like living among the insides of my mind.” Antonoff wanted a simpler home, something that went against Dunham’s creative vision. She agreed to make some changes, hoping to make him feel comfortable in their shared space.
“I felt sick every time I made a design concession or covered up pink with dove gray,” she remembers. “Love can onlysurvive so much. At night, I mapped out my dream space in my head.”
“The last time I saw that apartment was when we agreed, with love, that someone had to go,” Dunham recalls. “‘You can finally eat in the bed without anyone getting mad at you,’ he said through tears.”
Antonoff stayed in the apartment post-split, while Dunham quickly purchased a new place of her own — a decision she soon regretted.
“I made amassive real-estate mistake, the kind that nightmares are made of,” she writes, noting that she never even moved in to the apartment she bought, instead selling it at a loss and bouncing around from friends’ houses to hotel rooms to her father’s office. “I bought something in a state of panic, feeling like if I didn’t put down roots soon I’d float away.”
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Now, more than a year and a half later, Dunham tellsDominothat she has happily settled down in an “eccentric” second-floor Manhattan rental thatfinally makes her feel like she’s home. Decorated with the help of a designer to her exact tastes and plenty of personalized touches (including a color-coded bookcase and pillows custom embroidered with images of her cats, both pictured above), she says she doesn’t want to ever leave.
“Across from me is a luxurious brownstone, but I’m not sure how it’s decorated,” she writes. “I’ve stopped looking in other people’s windows… I’m finally home.”
Read the full story in the Fall 2019 issue ofDomino, on newsstands September 3, and ondomino.com.
source: people.com
