There Are 13 Different Places to Sit in This New Jersey Creator’s One-Bedroom Apartment

There’s a certain set of skills involved when you are a content creator. Being a wiz with a camera is essential. Knowing your way around editing apps certainly helps. And identifying your niche is necessary for outsmarting the ever-changing algorithms. But Andrew Licout, a New Jersey–based creative, has a special social media superpower: a background in spatial design and theater production. It’s what lends a little something extra, like a perfectly balanced scene in each shot, to every single post. Licout’s knack for keeping an audience engaged, from his impeccable color choices to his flawless framing, doesn’t end on his profile’s feed. All the details in his one-bedroom apartment tell a story beyond Instagram. 

The creative’s penchant for a well-balanced space goes back to his high school days as a theater kid. He loved the stage so much that he went to college to study set design, which then set him on a journey to New York City, where he built scenes on Broadway, coordinated visual production for Calvin Klein, and crafted showroom displays for Ralph Lauren Home. Although he works full time in front of the camera now, every so often he gets the urge to go behind the scenes and build something. Now his work takes center stage in the 700-square-foot place he moved into last fall. 

Past the mismatched dining set and positioned squarely on top of the layered rugs sits a birch plywood, and acrylic coffee table he built himself. The inspiration was one part Donald Judd, one part Japanese dinner table. Licout’s original design stopped with the wood top, but after bringing it to the apartment, he decided it needed a facelift. So he glued wood pegs in each corner, which allowed him to snap a smoky custom-cut panel of acrylic on top. “Now it’s interchangeable, so I can swap out the color throughout the seasons,” he says. “It’s an infinite number of coffee tables in one.”

Because making the table was so fulfilling, it was one of just two pieces Licout built and brought from his previous place in Brooklyn. (The other item is a side table, which now lives in the bathroom.) He moved into this spot immediately after returning from a two-month trip abroad and says it was the European-like layout, which he calls “a race track” because each room cycles into the next, that convinced him to start this next chapter in New Jersey.

It was that same trip that also drove his vision for this space. Longtime Licout followers might recall the all-neutral-everything residence he lived in before. “My last apartment was very white,” he says. “It was warm, but I was always afraid of color.” Between the vibrant streets of Lisbon and cozy cabins in Switzerland he found himself in last summer, Licout developed a new appreciation for incorporating different shades, and so he layered several earthy hues—forest greens chief among them—throughout the space. “I started to think, if there’s one or two through-lines where I tie back materials and shapes and some colors, hopefully, it’ll all look uniform in the end.” 

Circles became one of the unifying motifs Licout incorporated to offset the harsh angles and lines throughout the rooms. “I knew I wanted to have kind of a waterfall of circles when you walk in and see the tabletop, the base, and then the rug,” he says. You’ll notice the shapes again in the floor lamps on either side of the sofa, in figures on the shelves, and in the artwork on the walls. “There are subtle checkpoints of certain elements through the apartment where you’re not really sure why, but it all feels right,” he adds.

Another theme Licout has embraced, albeit unintentionally, is an abundance of chairs. Although he lives alone, his place has about 13 places to plop, including a red farmhouse-style seat in the corner (it’s the one that gets the most hate from his followers, who call it “grandma’s blanket chair”), a curvy green number he splurged on (which seems to be a comment-section crowd-pleaser), and if you look closely, a few strategically placed stools under the built-in shelves. There’s also a Wassily dupe that was a cost-savvy purchase he takes pride in. “I’m not going to spend a few grand on a real one when there’s so many like it at an affordable price,” he says. In fact, curating his place on a sensible budget has always been a tenet of his style—he believes good design doesn’t always mean spending a fortune. “Having a real one wasn’t important to me, so it didn’t feel smart to spend that money there,” he notes.

Tucked off the room of chairs is Licout’s verdant bedroom. “It went through maybe six iterations,” he says. There were several bed frame swaps and a period where he started to weave in colors from the other areas of the home. “I tried it, and I’m like, I don’t want to sleep in here,” he says. “I’m gonna go back to monochrome, pick the perfect color, and just do shades of that.” That hue turned out to be Glidden’s English Ivy, and it set the scene for his solid wood spindle headboard. Knowing he didn’t plan to hang art over the bed, he needed something to add interest at least halfway up the wall, and this frame did just that. It also happened to be a match for the natural tone that lines the built-in cabinets on the opposite wall. 

If you’re wondering whether or not any of Licout’s choices were influenced by his work in the public eye, of course they were. “I thought a lot about what I do for a living when it comes to the apartment and how I could create interesting moments for filming,” he explains. But in the end, his aesthetic is less about earning likes from others and more about embracing his own. It’s the personification of the clothes in his closet, the music he listens to, and the films he watches, all of which happen to create an extremely engaging backdrop. Ultimately, the story that matters most is the one his space tells about him.