WHAT DREAMS ARE MADE OF: Bill DeSeta created much of the furniture in the couple’s townhouse, including the sturdy bed and built-in wall unit in their master bedroom. (Lorenzo Ciniglio/Freelance)
STEEL YOURSELF: The kitchen with high-end appliances is a far cry from the building’s former life as a ramshackle SRO. (Lorenzo Ciniglio/Freelance)
The fireplace mantel (Lorenzo Ciniglio/Freelance)
Standing in the gorgeous, six-story Upper West Side townhouse of Bill and Donna DeSeta, it’s hard to believe that it was once a ramshackle SRO.
Built in 1896, the once elegant single-family home had, by 1970, been divided into 20 rooms (each fit just a single cot), with only one lavatory on each of the six floors. But the building was big and for sale.
It was one of the first places that DeSeta and his then-fiancée, Donna Lazzara, had seen.
“I walked away,” Bill, a veteran theater producer/director and former nightclub operator, remembers. “But Donna said, ‘Look again. It’s really pretty on the outside.’ ”
They bought it after Bill got an idea that he could bring the building back to its former glory. And the way to do that, he realized, was to gut it — get rid of all those tiny rooms and walls — and start all over again.
“I was a theater set decorator at the time,” he says, “and I got a bunch of out-of-work actors and set decorators to work on the building. First, we took everything out. The only things that we left from the original building were a couple of window frames and the dining-room ceiling. The idea was to start from scratch and to try to make it as close to what it might have been as possible.”
It took them almost two years to rebuild the house. (Bill took a year off from his job to do nothing but work on the building.) “We did all the work ourselves,” he says. “Finally, in 1972, we moved in.”
Today, he and his prominent casting director wife Donna occupy two of the six floors — the remaining four floors are divided among eight tenants. Their duplex measures 3,000 square feet with a dining room, library, two bedrooms, three bathrooms and an exercise room. The DeSetas also have a private one-car garage.
They paid $170,000 for the building; it cost another $200,000 to restore it. And here’s how much the area has changed: The couple recently turned down a $13 million offer. “I don’t want to live anyplace else,” Bill says.
Not only did buying the building make great financial sense, but the DeSetas also were able to create a beautiful, custom-made apartment. There are arched doorways, Spanish-tiled floors, a fireplace with a stone mantel, stained-glass windows and a grand stairway.
And they really did it all themselves.
They salvaged the mantel when a nearby building was demolished and the mantel was thrown into a pile of rubble. “It probably weighed about 2,000 pounds,” Bill says. “We got it into an elevator, and it immediately sank to the ground. It took four of us to stand it up straight.”
Bill had no idea how to build a staircase, so he turned to a set decorator friend who’d built a couple of staircase sets. And Donna made the five stained-glass windows. “Bill wanted the windows,” she says, “but the cost was prohibitive. So I said, ‘OK, we’ll have to do it.’ I went to the Y, took a course and learned how to do it.”
The oak dining table Bill crafted out of leftover parquet flooring; he also made the bed in the master bedroom, along with the built-in wall unit surrounding it.
Beyond these handmade items, they added a Chinese server, an antique French coffee table made of burled wood, a couch they bought for $50, a life-size Betty Boop figure that Bill likes because it resembles Donna, a chandelier from a Macy’s warehouse sale and a stunning collection of contemporary art.
“We never bought anything as an investment,” Bill says of the artwork. “We only bought things we loved.”
Donna, who heads Donna DeSeta Casting (among the films she’s cast is “Knight and Day” with Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz) and Bill — who’s had an eclectic career as a theater/film producer and director, and also as a manager of the city’s oldest rock club, the Bitter End — met when she was an actress and he was a stage manager. She’d auditioned for a role and didn’t get the job, but she did get the guy. “I did very well,” Bill says with a grin.
Bill also got into the jewelry business.
“Donna was going to a party,” he says, “and she wanted something interesting to wear. We had no money, but I took a handful of filigrees and chains and made a vest for her. There was an editor from Glamour magazine at the party, and she told a buyer from Henri Bendel about the vest. So they bought some, and then Bloomingdale’s bought many more, and finally the designer Anne Klein added my pieces to her line.
“We used to dress Donna’s sister, Bernadette Peters [before she was a Broadway superstar], in the jewelry I’d made with a raincoat over it. She’d go to boutiques, open the coat and show them what she was wearing. That’s how I got the money to buy the house.”
Today, Bill is writing screenplays, novels (one of his books, “Racing September,” is about to be re-published by Temurlone Press) and a political blog called “The Urban Curmudgeon.”
“I was certainly flighty in my career,” Bill says. “I went from one thing to another all my life. When Donna and I got married and wanted to start a family, I thought, ‘We’ve got to get serious here.’ You can’t just have a kid without something solid.”
The couple now have a grown, married son and a granddaughter they dote on.
“The house is our way to not have to worry about money,” Bill says. “That’s why we bought it. That’s why I took a year off from work to build it. Because now we’ll always have a place to live.”
BILL AND DONNA DESETA’S FAVORITE THINGS
* The fireplace mantel
* The stained-glass windows
* The stairway
* Acarved English chair that was the first thing Donna bought for their apartment
* The oak dining room table Bill made
* Sculptures by Joy Brown, Peter Woytuk and Georgia Gerber
* A 16th-century piece of Spanish armor uAhand-carved Victorian armoire from the 1800s
* A rare panetière—abread box that cost $500. It was too expensive and too big to fit in their car. Bill borrowed a bigger car and surprised Donna.