Liev Schreiber’s New York apartment comes with one surprising country quirk

Liev Schreiber has always been terrified of chickens – it’s an anxiety that has plagued the “Ray Donovan” and “X-Men” actor since his hippie parents moved the family to a commune in Canada when he was a child. “They look like dinosaurs,” he told Architectural Digest in an interview for the magazine’s October issue. Yet, when Schreiber opens the doors to his home for AD’s October issue, he seems pretty comfortable surrounded by them. Posing feet-up on a Diamond Chair by Harry Bertoia for his photoshoot, Schrieber actually coddles a hen on his lap. A few feet or so in front is his wife, former beauty queen Taylor Neisen, barefoot in a butter yellow Chloé dress, joyfully cradling another of their hens under her armpit. In fact, Schreiber, who is set to star in the new Apple TV crime series “Nocturne,” shares his downtown Manhattan home with Neisen, his three children and five hens: Grandma, Sizzurp, Fern, Pico, and Miu Miu. The birds — which were Neisen’s idea — are usually confined to the rooftop of the converted 19th-century industrial space, a surprising country quirk in the heart of the city designed by landscaping firm Brooklyn Grange. Neisen’s own childhood, spent on a corn and soy farm in South Dakota, made carving out some nature essential. “We had sheep and pigs and chickens,” she said. “So making a green space on the roof was really important to me.” Among the many plants are wisteria and raspberry bushes. For the purposes of the magazine feature, Schreiber is breaking his one rule: “no chickens in the house.” To descend from the rooftop, a blackened-steel spiral staircase serves as an architectural centerpiece. But this dark, dramatic ambience does not dominate the décor – downstairs, the kitchen’s stained rift white oak cabinets and stone-topped island are subtler design decisions, but it’s still a room that took at least ten iterations to get right. Elsewhere, the couple’s love of vintage manifests with walnut grass-seated chairs, designed by George Nakashima in the 1940s, in the dining room, a 1950s Teak Pierre Jeanneret table in the bedroom and a sectional snake-shaped de Sede sofa designed in 1970s in the living room. Schrieber first bought the place in 1998 as a bachelor pad, but started living there properly after his split with actor Naomi Watts in 2016. It has housed him through countless acting roles, but its location was especially useful when he was performing in Shakespeare plays at the nearby Public Theater. Through a series of renovations it’s morphed from a one-bedroom apartment to a sophisticated NoHo triplex with a rooftop chicken coop, adjusting to major life milestones, such as the birth of Scherieber’s third child, Hazel Bee. The latest round of remodeling came from designers Ariel Ashe and Reinaldo Leandro, who Schrieber first worked with on a home he shared with Watts around a decade ago. “We wanted to get down to its bones,” Leandro told the magazine. He and Ashe leaned into the space’s historic texture, exposing brick walls and the charred wood beams in the family room, and stripping off drywall to reveal the original ceiling structure on the upper floor. The designers were tasked with a cohesive blueprint for urban living and did so by refashioning the entire layout — the kitchen and living room on the lowest floor were swapped out for children’s bedrooms, a new family den, and a home office for Schreiber where he can write screenplays and record voice-overs. “I was so impressed at how it turned out,” Schrieber told AD in 2018. “I never dreamed I’d have a home like that.”