The Insider: Fort Greene Townhouse Opens Up With Three-Story Additio

Everything in Will Kopelman’s apartment, it seems, has a tale to tell. Take just the living room, for example. A 1977 Triumph Bonneville 750 motorcycle stands like a sculpture in one corner. “When I had my children, I decided I didn’t want to ride anymore,” says the art adviser, who oversaw the decoration of the home he shares with his two daughters—Olive, six, and Frankie, four—from his previous marriage to actress Drew Barrymore. (The family remains close, and Barrymore lives just a few blocks away.) “But I didn’t want to sell it—it came off the production line the same year I was born!—so there it sits.”

Across the room, there’s the nearly 15-foot-long 17th-century tapestry depicting the coronation of Charlemagne that Kopelman snagged at auction in London before realizing it was too fragile to be unmounted and rolled up and so had to be crated flat for shipping and then craned in through the windows of the 10th-floor duplex. Kopelman picked up the boxy vintage leather armchairs in Vienna; he purchased the 19th-century ship’s carpenter’s tool set from a dealer in Nantucket; and he’s been collecting the scientific magnifying glasses, currently arrayed on one console, for years. A pair of vintage Cedric Hartman reading lamps belonged to his father—a former president of Chanel—who gave them to his son as a housewarming gift, and the side tables came from one of his grandmothers. Even the room’s curtains have a history: They came out of the apartment that Kopelman grew up in, which had been decorated by the legendary Mark Hampton in the 1980s.

“I love old things,” Kopelman explains. “And I love backstory—I used to work in a movie studio. Stories are a huge part of collecting.” The living room isn’t all vintage, though. It also boasts contemporary artworks by Marc Quinn, Mark Ryden, and Olaf Breuning.