An Ode to 70s-Style Living

“In a factory space or an industrial space, there’s a certain level of finish that’s not there,” he said. “You make do with chewing gum and tape.” Last December, Mr. Miller, who had spent more than a decade in Brooklyn lofts, rented a different kind of apartment — a conventional 600-square-foot one-bedroom in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, with distinct separations between the living room, bedroom and bathroom.

His intention was to turn it into a “completely designed space,” he said one that was finished right down to the refrigerator door — but there was a catch: he had only $5,000 to spend. Also, because the apartment was a rental, the renovation couldn’t be structural and it had to be portable.

For inspiration, Mr. Miller looked to the design of the 1970s, he said, which had “a populist luxury: polyester, Pop Art, plastic.”

He was also fond of the era’s wall-to-wall carpeting, which migrated from houses in suburban America to sunken living rooms in SoHo. “This was glamorous at the time,” he said. “Taking references from the common home and making them luxurious, in a silly kind of way.”

And so Mr. Miller’s apartment became an ode to the carpeted sunken living room: the 250-square-foot living area is organized around a platform raised on the perimeter and sunken in the middle; on the side near the kitchen counter, it rises high enough to function as a bench.

Mr. Miller describes it as “a landscape architecture of carpeted boxes.”

The platform was constructed out of plywood — $700 worth, assembled in Mr. Miller’s studio in Brooklyn — and covered in a chocolate-brown polyester carpet that cost $1.68 a square foot.

Most “cheap colors are really awful,” Mr. Miller said, explaining why he chose this particular rich brown. “I remember the colors being dead, without any intensity.”

To disguise the nonworking chimney and create a sense of height in the room, he designed a headboard-like panel (made of plywood strips, padded with three-quarter-inch-thick polyester batting and covered with brown cotton) that extends up to the eight-and-a-half-foot-high ceiling.

The carpeted area is furnished with a few items of his own design including what Mr. Miller calls “giant coasters” — four 16-inch-diameter disks of medium density fiberboard stained black and sprayed with clear polyurethane — that rest on the floor and serve as informal tables.

Several other black elements were added to the space to complement the coasters: an Ikea bureau opposite the foot of the platform, laminate on the kitchen counter, a bar stool, Ikea hanging lamps over the bar and tiles on the kitchen backsplash.

But the appliances in the kitchen, which were old and unsightly, still presented a problem. The refrigerator, for example, had a slightly uneven texture.

“I wasn’t going to buy new appliances, so I had to find a way of masking them and making them look less cheap,” Mr. Miller said. “So I reversed the grid of the tile, and used black eighth-of-an-inch masking tape, and taped it horizontally across the refrigerator, dishwasher and oven door.”

In the bedroom, the queen-size mattress is set within another platform to make it seem as if “the room was designed for the bed, instead of the bed just being stuck into it,” he said. What gives the room drama, though, is Mr. Miller’s antler chandelier over the bed.

The bathroom was the one room he left untouched, except for replacing a regular overhead light bulb with a red one, so the room glows a soft, skin-flattering pink.

At night, Mr. Miller said, his favorite place to be is on the top level of the platform, near the headboard, where he can look out the window, “like a bird on the highest branch.” His girlfriend, Julia Chaplin, a journalist who lives in Manhattan, offered a less romantic view of the virtues of Mr. Miller’s new space: “I never knew how cumbersome chairs and tables are,” she said.