On a typical morning in Brooklyn Heights, Sarah Crichton wakes up at 6:30 and heads out for a long, quiet walk, leaving her husband, Len Berman, snoozing peacefully in bed. When she returns from her stroll, she checks in on Len before heading downstairs to her own apartment, where she brews coffee for two. A short while later, Len wanders down a flight of stairs to her place, carrying the morning routine forward with coffee and their daily round of cards.
This domestic choreography is the daily reality for Sarah and Len, a married couple in their seventies who met on OkCupid in January 2020. Both are divorcees who maintain separate apartments in the very same Brooklyn Heights co-op building. Len owns unit 8J on the eighth floor, while Sarah’s home, unit 7G, sits directly below it on the seventh floor. For this New York City couple, the vertical separation has become the secret to a harmonious marriage, blending the intimacy of committed partnership with the autonomy of living alone.
An Unconventional Path to Co-op Living
The couple’s unique living arrangement is the culmination of years of shifting circumstances, starting with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. When they first met six years ago, Sarah was living alone in a spacious brownstone in Boerum Hill. Len, meanwhile, was subletting a place on the Upper West Side while his newly purchased apartment in Brooklyn Heights underwent a massive renovation.
As the city went into full lockdown and their relationship steadily deepened, Len moved into Sarah’s Boerum Hill brownstone so they could safely weather the health crisis together. While the intentions were good, the living situation carried subtle psychological hurdles. "He clearly didn’t feel at home," Sarah recalls. "Also, my ex-husband had lived there, and that was uncomfortable."
It ultimately took two years to complete the renovation of Len’s one-bedroom apartment on the eighth floor, a space he purchased following the conclusion of a 35-year marriage. When he finally moved into his freshly minted home in the spring of 2022, his enthusiasm was palpable. "He was so excited," Sarah says. "He was obsessed with his apartment."
Len, a retired IBM research scientist, began spending his days at his own place and staying there overnight. But the separation proved difficult for a couple accustomed to each other’s company, and Sarah soon began staying over at Len’s place more frequently. That fall, they tied the knot, and Sarah moved into the eighth-floor apartment nearly full-time.
While Len’s one-bedroom unit was roughly a quarter the size of Sarah’s former brownstone, the romance of the moment carried them through. "We were in love and happy, and it was like having a cute little aerie," Sarah remembers.
The Clash of Two Distinct Worlds
The honeymoon phase of sharing the cozy eighth-floor apartment eventually gave way to a new realization: Sarah felt entirely unrepresented in the space.
"This apartment reflects Len so powerfully," she says. "It’s the apartment of somebody who intensely loves the things he loves and also never had an apartment of his own to express himself. But it doesn’t reflect me."
The visual contrast between the two partners is stark. The first time Sarah saw Len’s home, she recalls it looking like "the apartment of a mathematician." Filled with geometric shapes and orderly structures, it serves as an external projection of his mind. Len himself describes it with candid amusement: "It’s got a lot of geometric stuff in it. It’s kind of an orderly sort of apartment. Except it’s totally unorderly. And the more intensely mine it is, the messier it gets!"
A tour of Len’s apartment reveals an eclectic, industrial aesthetic. With stark white walls, endless expanses of tile, industrial shelving, and storage units ordered straight from the Uline catalogue, the rooms resemble a hybrid between a contemporary art gallery and a commercial warehouse. The walls are lined with wire grid-wall panels—the kind typically deployed for retail displays. "It lets you move things around, in theory," Len notes. "Not that I’ve ever moved anything."
Among the eclectic items on display in Len’s space are a Mad Hatter top hat, a series of cartoonish paintings, festive Christmas lights, a fly swatter, bungee cords, retractable tape measures, exercise bands, sunglasses, and a sack of dog biscuits. "Sometimes a dog will visit," Len explains. "And I like to be prepared."
His furniture choices lean heavily toward the ad hoc. His desk consists of a used slab of countertop resting atop a pair of ancient filing cabinets. Nearby, a restaurant utility cart holds a dust buster, an industrial mixer, and a bucket of vintage Altoids containers.
Sarah’s aesthetic sensibilities, by contrast, lean decidedly traditional. As a book editor, she is naturally drawn to warm colors, intricate Central Asian patterned rugs, sleek cherrywood cabinets, and mid-century modern furniture—an environment she describes simply as "classic New York." Her space is also significantly less cluttered.
Finding a Solution Downstairs
Recognizing the need to balance togetherness with individual space, the couple initially explored various alternatives, including buying a larger two-bedroom apartment together or renting a separate studio that Sarah could use as an office.
Then, about six months after their wedding, serendipity intervened. Sarah was browsing StreetEasy and noticed an open house scheduled for noon that day in an apartment located directly downstairs from Len’s unit.
"We hadn’t really figured out what we wanted to do," Sarah recalls. "And then we walked in, and I whispered to Len, ‘I want this!’ So we bought it that afternoon, basically."
The financial reality of their building made the dual purchase surprisingly feasible. Because their co-op is tied up in an unpredictable land-lease situation, the individual units sell for roughly half the typical market rate in Brooklyn Heights. Consequently, buying and maintaining two separate units in the building costs them less overall than acquiring a standard two-bedroom apartment in the desirable neighborhood.
A Carefully Orchestrated Routine
For a married couple living across separate doors, Sarah and Len spend a remarkable amount of time in each other’s company. Following their morning coffee and cards in Sarah’s seventh-floor apartment, Len heads back upstairs to work on a science-fiction novel he has been writing. Meanwhile, Sarah sets up shop in her downstairs bedroom, which she has converted into a home office. Outfitted with a fold-out sofa instead of a bed, this room also serves as the designated sleeping quarters for overnight guests.
Around noon, Sarah heads back upstairs to Len’s apartment, where she frequently spends the remainder of the day. She sets up her laptop at the dining table while Len works at his nearby desk.
"We get lonely," Sarah admits.
"I like her to be here," Len adds. "I mean, I’m glad she can go, but I’m glad when she’s here. If she was downstairs and didn’t come up here to make lunch, I’d probably come down."
Because they typically eat both lunch and dinner together in Len’s apartment, that is where the couple keeps their everyday food supply, utilizing Sarah’s kitchen for overflow storage. However, because Sarah’s more traditional space features a long dining room table and a full suite of large pots and roasting pans, her apartment serves as the hub for entertaining. Last fall, she hosted Thanksgiving dinner for 16 people down on the seventh floor.
Logistics can occasionally become humorous. "We do wander up and down with pots of food and stuff like that because we have different equipment," Sarah says. "I finally got a Cuisinart in Len’s apartment because I just can’t live without a food processor."
Following dinner and another round of cards, Sarah typically unwinds by reading and watching television in Len’s bedroom before turning in early. The couple always sleeps together in Len’s bed. Len, who stays up late working at his desk, steers clear of late-night television. "I don’t like to watch TV, period," he says. "And in bed? I’m just not going to do it." If they want to watch a movie together, they head downstairs to Sarah’s office.
Moving between the two floors is an active affair. They typically take the stairs rather than waiting for the elevator, unless they are hauling heavy loads, and they never knock before entering each other’s units. To streamline access, they installed identical locks on both front doors so that a single key opens both apartments. "I didn’t want to have to carry two keys, and Sarah can never find her keys, so having one key was bad enough," Len explains.
Financial responsibilities are handled with a blend of independence and cooperation. Each maintains a separate bank account and pays the mortgage and maintenance fees for their respective home. They split the cost of groceries and a weekly housekeeper—who cleans both apartments—using a joint account. Laundry duties are shared as well: Sarah sorts and starts the loads in the building’s basement laundry room, while Len, who professes to be better at folding, finishes the job.
An Ideal Arrangement
After two years of this routine, the couple finds that reaction from friends and acquaintances is uniformly positive. "Everyone goes, ‘Oh my God, that’s just the most ideal situation,’" Sarah says. "And it is!"
"We both get to express ourselves without oppressing the other," Len adds.
To prevent the physical separation from creating emotional distance, the couple established one firm rule early on: they never sleep apart. The concept was tested only once during a squabble while staying at a vacation rental in Cape Cod.
"I put my foot down and said, ‘We don’t do that,’" Len recalls.
"Sleeping separately would be a crime against the marriage, against the relationship," Sarah agrees. "But certainly, there are times when you get on each other’s nerves, and it’s fantastic to be able to go downstairs. When one is upset, one wants to be comforted by objects or things you look at. There’s not a lot of my stuff in Len’s apartment that feeds me that way, except for Len and the cat."
Slowly, however, the boundaries are beginning to soften. Sarah’s design sensibilities have begun making subtle incursions into Len’s industrial domain. She successfully had a television installed in the bedroom, lined the hallway with her favorite books, and hung a poster of her late mother featuring Che Guevara in the entryway.
When Len recently proposed installing more industrial grid-wall panels over his living room sofa, Sarah drew a firm line. "Enough with the grid!" she says. Instead, she hopes to find an oversize painting to anchor the space.
Len, meanwhile, has alternative ideas for the living room wall. "I want to get a tripod and a projector and use that wall to watch movies. That would be perfect," he counters.
With apartment 8G currently listed for sale in the building, the ongoing domestic negotiations may yet take another vertical turn.
