How Jesse Johnson Made an Apartment in 'Mad' Magazine's Former SoHo Office Feel Like ...

Jesse Johnson’s career has been anything but linear. Once known primarily as an actor and musician (who also moonlighted as a heavy-duty schlepper while apprenticing with friends Louisa Pierce and Emily Ward of Pierce & Ward), the AD PRO Directory member has added designer to his résumé defined by curiosity and hustle. “I’m as passionate about it as I am about all these other things,” he says. Appropriately, his latest residential project occupies a building in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood with its own stacked history: a Cass Gilbert–designed Beaux Arts tower that later became luxury condos—and once housed the offices of Mad magazine.

The two-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath residence marks Johnson’s first New York project since founding Jesse Johnson Creative in 2022. With a growing portfolio in Southern California and South Florida, the longtime Angelino realized his sun-washed playbook wouldn’t translate to the dense, gritty streets of Gotham. “It’s a far departure from the beachy-bungalow vibe,” he says. “We knew we needed to be structured.” At the same time, his tech-entrepreneur client—a longtime friend who also recently decamped from the West Coast—asked that the 2,063-square-foot bachelor pad function as a refuge: plush, composed, and calm in the middle of the city.

For urban drama, Johnson leaned into the unit’s 12-foot ceilings and sweeping north- and west-facing views. But the existing architecture also presented challenges, notably a long L-shaped plan, a series of irregular niches, and structural quirks—like a hulking steel column slicing through the middle of the main bathroom. “It’s unavoidable,” the designer says. “We saw it as this very industrial, New York City element.” Rather than disguise it, Johnson left the beam exposed and echoed its hard-edged materiality across the rest of the bathroom’s fixtures.

That same spirit of accommodation informed the small south-facing studio, where a peculiar stepped-up floor plate became the cue for a more ceremonial, almost temple-like atmosphere. The room is wrapped floor to ceiling in wood paneling with a raw yet finely textured finish, transforming an awkward architectural anomaly into a quietly theatrical moment.

Elsewhere, the balance tips decisively toward refinement. In the primary living, dining, and kitchen suite, streamlined prewar, modernist postwar, and Asian-contemporary furnishings create a composed domesticity that feels calibrated to downtown New York. “When I think of New York, I think Deco,” says Johnson. “But we were also pushing a little toward Japandi.”

The mix feels intuitive because, in many ways, New York is familiar territory for Johnson. Though he grew up largely in Colorado, parts of Johnson’s family—including his actor father Don and actress half-sister Dakota—kept an apartment on the Upper West Side, making the project something of a homecoming. Still actively balancing film and television roles alongside his design practice, Johnson relishes the tangibility of the work. “What I love about this creative outlet is there’s a physical artifact at the end of it,” he says. “It’s something tangible. Something real.”