David Sedaris writes five to six hours a day, even on Christmas and his birthday, in an office he designed to look like a Park Avenue therapist’s room — complete with a rug that reads "Trouble." "Everyone wants me to get a sofa in here," he said. "But I want my patients to just lie on the trouble rug." That private routine helps explain why, after two decades in Europe, he decided in 2019 to buy a home back in Manhattan.
Sedaris and his partner, Hugh Hamrick, bought a 2,500-square-foot apartment a few blocks from Central Park and then, in 2020 during the pandemic, purchased the penthouse directly above it. The penthouse, the couple’s most recent acquisition, comes with multiple terraces overlooking the New York City skyline — outdoor space that Sedaris has called "nice at night." The move doubled their vertical footprint in the building at a moment when many were rethinking what they needed from a city home.
The practical motive for a larger Manhattan residence is visible in what fills it: a growing art collection that includes two Picasso paintings and a study for Franz Kline’s 1950 painting "Chief" that hangs in Sedaris’s office. He estimated that a full-size "Chief" would be worth about $40 million if it were for sale rather than on display at the MoMA. "I want paintings by masters, but I want small ones," he said, a neat summary of how the couple has used their space.
Sedaris has said he chose the Upper East Side for its quiet. "What’s really great about this neighborhood is that there are no tourists," he said, adding, "There is no real reason for people to come here, unless you are going to the Met or something like that." That preference traces back to the 1990s, when he rented in SoHo and found the street life intrusive: "Someone’s car alarm would go off for hours and hours, and somebody would be playing on a drum set on the street," he recalled. "If someone tried that on the Upper East Side, that would be shut down immediately."
The choice of Manhattan rather than a perpetually quieter borough sits beside a familial push in another direction: Sedaris’s sister, Amy, urged him and Hamrick to consider an apartment in the Greenwich Village building where she lives. Hamrick remembered her saying, "She wanted us to get it because she didn’t want neighbors," and added that she expected the couple to be traveling frequently. Instead, the couple bought near Central Park and then, in the odd calculus of 2020, acquired the space directly above them.
Small domestic details accent the picture: Sedaris arranged his office so it "looks like the backdrop to a talk show," and he points out work that began in unlikely places — "It was done on a page of the phone book," he said of a piece in the house. He has written regularly for The New Yorker since 1995 and says one practical advantage of his Upper East Side address is proximity to health care: "I want to be able to walk to my chemo appointments," he has said, a remark that underlines how location choices mix comfort, access, and privacy.
The unanswered piece of the story is simple: the source does not explain why the couple bought the unit directly above theirs in 2020. What is plain is what the addition produced — more interior space for a substantial art collection and multiple terraces with skyline views — and what did not follow: there is no confirmation of further purchases or sales. For now, Sedaris’s method remains the same: long daily hours at his desk in a room arranged around a rug that says "Trouble," and a Manhattan home reshaped, quietly, to hold the work and the art that matter to him.
