This Old Sea-Biscuit Factory

"It was definitely an adventure," says the novelist Jean Hanff Korelitz of the switch she and her husband, the poet Paul Muldoon, made from the Upper West Side to the Financial District. For a decade, the couple had lived in a 1910 building that Korelitz tolerated because it was closer to her son's school. When he graduated, she got on StreetEasy."

""I had a specific thing I wanted: an old and unmodified space. Basically, I wanted to live in the 19th century," she says. "I wanted to be reminded of Gangs of New York." Korelitz, whose fiction is set in the present day, came across the loft of an 1860s sea-biscuit factory near the South Street Seaport. At the open house, the view from the windows ­facing the street reminded her of an Edward Hopper painting."

"The couple divvied up the open space into discreet zones and enlisted their daughter, Dorothy, a decorator, to close off the bedroom with library walls. Muldoon, who was a professor at Princeton for nearly 40 years, turned a narrow nook in the living room into his workstation. "I am a person who has gone to an office throughout my writing life," he says. "Honestly, what else are you going to do with a spot like this?""

Jean Hanff Korelitz and Paul Muldoon relocated from the Upper West Side to a loft in an 1860s sea-biscuit factory near South Street Seaport. Korelitz sought an old, unmodified space to evoke the 19th century and saw an Edward Hopper–like view from the windows. The couple divided the open plan into discreet zones and had their daughter install library walls to enclose the bedroom. Muldoon converted a narrow living-room nook into a workstation. Korelitz writes on a sofa with her dogs Sherlock and Finn. The couple prefers salvaged, secondhand furniture; the couches represent the first new purchases since 1997.

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