More or Less

After years of marriage, Dorothy and Stephen Globus grew apart aesthetically. So they built his and hers apartments, side by side.

- WENDY GOODMAN

DOROTHY AND STEPHEN GLOBUS have been married for 49 years and have lived 47 of them on the seventh floor of the onetime Gorham Manufacturing Company Building on Broadway, just north of Union Square.

Before they moved in, the space had been home, as Dorothy remembers it, to a Chia Pet warehouse. But it had glorious floor-to-ceiling windows, a fireplace, and lots of room to raise their two kids. The couple would spend their weekends scouring antique fairs and novelty stores, and their house became filled with all manner of things. “We were doing it in lockstep,” Dorothy says of their accumulating. “But then he sort of turned away from it. I think it was in the ’90s, when he went to Japan, he began to change his mind about how much he wanted to be surrounded by.”

Dorothy worked for the Smithsonian when it moved its design collections into the Carnegie Mansion—home to today’s Cooper Hewitt, where she was curator of exhibitions from 1972 to 1992. Later, she was director of the Museum at F.I.T., then the curator of exhibitions at the Museum of Art and Design, from which she retired in 2013. Stephen had helped start various businesses, including the Media Factory in Union Square, and had sold one he was involved with to Panasonic, which meant spending time in Japan.

Dorothy’s attitude remains: “Marie Kondo says throw out anything you don’t love. Well, I love it all, Marie! What am I going to do?” Fortunately, at 4,000 square feet, there was room enough for their separate worlds, especially after the kids moved out.