There's a trick to living in small spaces, explains designer Suchi Reddy, who crafted her own 375-square-foot Greenwich Village apartment like a “little ship: everything is built in, everything is white, and everything has to be in its place.” So when former gallerist Sara Meltzer, a single mom with 8-year-old twins, asked Reddy to renovate her 2,400-square-foot Tribeca loft within a tight budget—and an even tighter time frame—the resourceful principal of Reddymade Design used her own lifestyle as a guide.

Working with the existing floor plan—which included adequate mechanicals, electrical, and plumbing—Reddy focused on reproportioning the layout. She added room-dividing shelves in the bedrooms that blend with the unit's bleached-wood floors, upgraded the master bath, and painted the entire apartment white—a quiet palette for the client's eclectic mix of contemporary art and vintage 20th-century furnishings. She even revived a tired 30-square-foot powder room with a serviceable black mosaic floor by painting its badly patched ceiling in the same obsidian color and wrapping the walls in a playfully irreverent black-and-white “Sassy Toile” wall covering. The kitchen, however, needed a lot of work.