“I love retro stuff from the 1950s and 1960s, but I try to keep it to a minimum because I don’t want my place to start looking like the set of a TV show,” explains Andrew Begg, with an accent that hints at his New Zealand roots. It’s true, one too many Tulip chairs, and you’re on The Merv Griffin Show. Fortunately for Begg, a U.N. diplomat, he knows how to do retro in moderation. His one-bedroom Hell’s Kitchen apartment perfectly combines old-school charms, like his two J.H. Lynch prints of sultry pinup-ish girls, with contemporary touches, like a Design Within Reach sofa-bed-cum-storage-unit and modern kitchen appliances. (“The oven is big enough for a massive turkey.”)

Begg’s space, which is on the seventh floor of a luxury doorman building, is open and white, but far from boring. He used multiple coats of high-gloss paint so that the walls literally shine. “I wanted them to look like a mirror,” he says. The walls and shelves display souvenirs from both near and far, with many of his favorite pieces—a green blown-glass sculpture and a brass wall hanging—unearthed in thrift stores in Montreal, where he often travels. “Montreal has some amazing junk stores because in the 1950s and ’60s, it was booming. But in the ’70s, the economy went downhill and everyone started selling their stuff.” Other artifacts show his sense of Kiwi pride: A blown-up photo he took of children jumping off a dock in Wellington Harbour is mounted over his couch, and a map of New Zealand that once hung in the recently shuttered restaurant Florent now hangs in his foyer. (He won it in Florent’s memorabilia eBay auction for $400.) The rest of his treasures come from the trash. One of his favorite trash finds is a print of Jesus Christ he pulled out of a garbage can in Barcelona. He calls it “Catholic kitsch.”

But, according to Begg, the most interesting piece in his living room is an authentic—though beaten up—red Knoll Tulip chair that he found on a curb with a sign that read: “A chair with very bad luck and sad history [frown face].” Begg took his chances and schlepped it home on his way back from a nightclub at 3am. He keeps the sign tucked under the chair’s cushion as a reminder, but it’s been nine months, and so far, nothing bad has happened.

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