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Inside David Harbour’s Custom-Renovated New York Loft

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David Harbour spent ten months gutting a century-old wagon factory to build the downtown loft he’d always wanted.

Best known as Chief Jim Hopper on “Stranger Things,” Harbour opened his NoHo home to Architectural Digest’s “Open Door” series in November 2019, walking cameras through a space he helped design from the studs up. The building itself dates back to New York’s industrial era, and Harbour chased that history rather than covering it over.

• Harbour bought a vintage loft inside a former wagon factory in NoHo, drawn to an authentic, classic New York feel rather than a polished new build.
• He partnered with designer Lorenzo Oliveri and the team at Gramercy Design on a 10-month gut renovation that kept the footprint open instead of carving it into separate rooms.
• The finished space restored the building’s original tin ceilings and exposed brick, paired with oversized windows, a custom kitchen, and an open office layered into the living area.

Restoring a Wagon Factory’s Bones

Rather than mask the building’s industrial past, Harbour and his team stripped the tin ceilings back to their original detail and left the brick exposed throughout the main living space. The oversized windows that once lit a working factory floor now flood the loft with daylight, and Harbour leaned on that architecture instead of fighting it. It’s the same instinct that drives a lot of the exposed-brick, high-ceiling renovation work featured in load-bearing gut jobs across the city, where the goal is keeping a building’s original character intact rather than erasing it.

An Open Plan by Design

Harbour and Oliveri made a deliberate choice not to chop the loft into conventional rooms. The layout keeps a spacious central living room flowing directly into an open office, with curated rugs, vintage artwork, and eclectic furnishings doing the work that walls would normally do elsewhere.

The renovation took ten months from gut to finish — and it kept the loft’s original wide-open footprint instead of dividing it up.

Kitchen and Living Details

The open-concept kitchen was outfitted with high-end modern appliances and custom cabinetry built for actual entertaining, not just for show. It sits within sightline of the living room, so cooking and hosting happen in the same open air as everything else in the loft — a layout choice that echoes the entertaining-first kitchens showing up in other big New York City builds right now.

Bedroom and Bath

The bedroom and bathroom suites carry the same industrial-meets-tailored approach as the rest of the home, blending custom millwork with vintage and industrial fixtures. Nothing about the finish work reads as generic hotel-style luxury; it’s built to match the raw bones of the wagon factory it’s sitting inside. That same balance of scale and character shows up in loft renovations like the one detailed in this sprawling Manhattan townhouse tour, where old bones get paired with modern comfort rather than replaced.

Harbour told AD the finished loft realized a vision he’d carried for years — an open, artistic downtown space he could actually live in day to day, not just show off. Ten months of gutting and restoring got him there, tin ceilings and all.