“I need to be cripplingly overwhelmed by how colorful everything is,” artist Misha Kahn says. Which made the process of moving in with his boyfriend, Interview-magazine editor Nick Haramis, tricky. “My last apartment was very Patrick Bateman on a budget,” Haramis says. “A lot of glass, metal, and black leather.” Kahn, whose current show at Friedman Benda gallery features his finds from scavenging trash along the shoreline of Dead Horse Bay, was also determined to find a “long-lost gem” and dug deep on Craigslist, emerging with lovely apartments — without windows or running water. The compromise: Haramis promised Kahn he could do whatever he wanted with the space, as long as the apartment itself was “nice and normal.” So, Haramis says, “we now live in a Pee-wee’s Playhouse.”

The living room features a Campana brothers – designed furry couch and fish-scale-adorned chest, and the centerpiece of the dining room is a soft-rubber table in the shape of Denmark, designed by Gaetano Pesce. “Eating anything other than soup on it is an adventure,” Kahn says. The floor-through, on the top of a walk-up in Greenpoint, is a rental, and while that usually limits how ambitious tenants get with decorating, Kahn and Haramis didn’t let that stand in the way of their vision. For instance, in the kitchen, all surfaces save for the oven are covered in what looks like a deconstructed Chagall painting, with one wall plastered in bright-yellow Voutsa wallpaper. Kahn says, “It’s the visual equivalent of an alarm that wakes you up to the voices of screaming children.”

The Bedroom: Kahn designed a pair of sconces for a production of La Calisto at Juilliard. Haramis helped: “I was watching The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills when I worked on the one on the right, which is covered in copper leaf, because I am color-blind and bad at sconce-making,” he says. “We put stuffed animals in them as a joke, but now that’s their home.” The Moroccan boucherouite is from Heirloom in Williamsburg, and was bought to cover the otherwise standard gray headboard. “Because if your eyes aren’t bleeding, we must be doing something wrong,” Haramis says. The fan and stools are by Kahn. The View Into the Bedroom (right): “A weekend project involving an Ikea rug and fiberglass yard décor,” Kahn says. The toothy Japanese print on the far bedroom wall is by Tadanori Yokoo.

The Living Room: The living room is its own ecosystem. The woven platypus-looking standing lamp is by Kahn. The Campana Brothers designed the furry couch and cabinet made out of pirarcu fish skin and tufted raffia. The rug is from Heirloom. “Misha made the table — a glass box filled with lapis-lazuli-pigment powder — for my birthday,” Haramis says. “I love those Yves Klein tables. Like most things in the house, it is both a joy-inducing thing of beauty, and a ticking time bomb because we’re worried it will smash and stain our entire existence blue.”

*A version of this article appears in the November 13, 2017, issue of New York Magazine.