Client-designer communication can be a delicate thing. It doesn’t typically involve quoting “Sprockets.” But in 2016, when Liev Schreiber decided to retool his triplex apartment in Manhattan’s NoHo district, the Saturday Night Live reference just seemed right. The initial brainstorms yielded proposals that struck the actor as “uncomfortably Teutonic,” he says, recounting his lively give-and-take with Ariel Ashe and Reinaldo Leandro, the 30-something principals who head up the AD100 New York design firm Ashe + Leandro . “Like, ‘I know you want to touch my monkey.’ ”

Schreiber, wearing a Rag & Bone sweater and jeans, in the kitchen of his NoHo loft. Douglas-fir and black lacquer cabinets by Ashe + Leandro; black soapstone counters. Fashion styling by Chloe Hartstein.

Schreiber, of course, nails this line—the accent, the inflection—with diamond-laser accuracy. He couldn’t have found a better audience for it. Ashe’s first design job was on set at SNL, and her brother-in-law is Seth Meyers. Suffice it to say, she has a sense of humor. More to the point, Ashe and Leandro’s work has an easygoing cool to it; it’s rigorous, but it’s also relaxed, not unlike the duo themselves. So, you don’t want “Sprockets”? OK, no “Sprockets.” Put into practice at Schreiber’s apartment, the Ashe + Leandro approach—modernist yet utterly livable—has yielded something that all three agree is rare in the age of too-tall, too-skinny condo towers and Edison-bulbed brownstone renos. “We wanted it to feel like a real New York space,” Leandro says. And it does. Schreiber knows from real New York spaces.

He grew up virtually around the corner, spending a chunk of his boyhood at the corner of 1st and First. “This reminds me of my friends’ lofts down in SoHo when we were kids,” the actor says, settling his six-foot-three frame into one of the living room’s outsize sofas, which Schreiber already owned. (During the nine-month renovation, this specimen, too big to get out the door, was wrapped and lashed to the ceiling.) “That, for me, felt like home—something that had art in it and had that kind of rawness and openness.” Schreiber’s place has all of that, in spades.

The space itself has some backstory: Starting in the late ’90s, Schreiber cobbled together the three-level, three-bedroom apartment from a couple of units in this circa-1880, redbrick, Neo-Grec industrial building. The Yale Drama grad’s career had taken off following a breakthrough role in Nora Ephron’s Mixed Nuts. Soon enough came Scream (and Scream 2), and an eye-opening turn as Hamlet in 1999 at the Public Theater, just a few blocks away. The bachelor pad, tricked out with help from his older brother, a stonemason, served Schreiber well.

Liev was very clear that he didn’t want a bachelor pad.

After he partnered up with Naomi Watts, in 2005, the place became the stage for a whole new production: family life. (Their sons, Sasha and Kai, are now ten and nine.) Still, the couple got the itch for a new home. And in 2012, they found digs farther downtown, hiring Ashe and Leandro to do the job (AD, March 2016). When Schreiber and Watts separated, in late 2016, he was determined to create something new from his beloved old NoHo apartment . He felt a real rapport with the designers, so he enlisted them to update the space for his life now. “Liev was very clear that he didn’t want a bachelor pad,” Leandro says. “He wanted a real home, one that catered to family and kids.”

Inside Liev Schreiber’s Industrial NYC Apartment

So, with no shortage of punchy back-and-forth between client and design team, the bachelor pad grew up. As Schreiber puts it, “They’d do things, and I’d say, ‘You know, I’m not as butch as you think I am! Warm it up!’ ” Ashe admits that the bestubbled actor, with his hulking presence and flair for hard-bitten roles, did seem, at first, “sort of terrifying.” But, she says, she managed to emerge victorious: “We’d bring new stuff over, and he’d be like, ‘No. Hate it.’ And I’d say, ‘Call me in three days.’ ”

The actor may play tough on TV, but we’re talking about a fellow who’s been known to dip into Seneca and Montaigne, who spends quality time with the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, whose IMDb listing oozes quality, and who is a familiar presence around the neighborhood, walking Woody, his very cute Hurricane Harvey rescue dog, or cycling with his boys. With his mix of well-honed urbanity and street savvy, Schreiber is every bit a New Yorker’s New Yorker.

So is the apartment, with its distressed-oak floors, steel staircases, wide-open flow, and old-school galley kitchen with new-school black stone counters and sleek Miele appliances, where Schreiber might offer a visiting friend fresh-baked banana bread and a cup of PG Tips tea. It’s also where he gathers his sons for meals, for their presence is unmistakable here, from the bedrooms outfitted with Prouvé and Eames chairs and Harry Potter wands to the board games and the student nylon-string guitar propped up in the living room.

Schreiber’s own quarters are a low-key affair, with one indulgence: a walk-in closet, which prompts him to exclaim, “This I thought I would never have!” Up on the top floor, there’s a glassed-in mini gym flooded with light. “This is the room Ray Donovan built,” he jokes. It doubles as a meditation room. (Schreiber spent part of his childhood at an ashram school.)

For an apartment overrun by two growing boys, there’s a lot of calm and order. Schreiber likes it that way. “I learned all about order, I think, from playing football in high school,” he says, referring to his days on the team at Brooklyn Tech. That touch of gridiron discipline morphed into the focus Schreiber brings to his craft, his career, his family life, his living space, and his friendships, including the one—powered by “Sprockets” jokes and mutual admiration—with Ashe and Leandro. The process of working to create these reborn digs, comfortable and familiar and yet all new, brings Schreiber back to the excitement of having scored the place 20-some years ago. What he thought then is just as true now: “I never dreamed I would own a place like this.”

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