If you’ve seen Julio Torres’s HBO comedy special, My Favorite Shapes, you already know that he has a singular aesthetic. “I love the color clear,” he deadpans, sitting in front of an architectural set, which consists of a series of arches painted the softest shades of millennial pink and melodramatic purple. For a delightful 57 minutes, the writer-actor-comedian starts and stops a conveyor belt delivering a series of decorative objects (his “favorite shapes”) and subsequently reveals each object’s secret interior life. Simply put, Julio’s “niche” (his word, not ours) onstage world is our ultimate dreamscape—or at least it was, before we saw his Brooklyn apartment.
“The biggest hurdle was finding a place that could house that giant green structure that’s wrapping the wall in my office,” the multihyphenate says of finding his two-bedroom in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The lime-green piece, which now serves as both a bookshelf and a table leg, is actually a miniature of the My Favorite Shapes set created by Lauren Bahr for a photo shoot. There are lots of familiar friends from the HBO special dotting his office: Julio’s mom, an architect, and sister, a designer, created the baby-blue chair on translucent casters, which they had made at home in El Salvador. Now it’s his desk chair. “I like that it’s a very silly piece of furniture, but it’s also very functional. It has wheels, so it makes me feel like I’m in a workshop,” he says.
The stand-alone workspace was a prerequisite. "Having an office where I could write that was separate from everything else was my top priority," he tells us. But Julio also wanted the extra room for visitors like his mom, Tita Torres, and sister, Marta Torres, who often weigh in on his decor decisions. "I feel like I have this court of advisers," he explains of his family and friends who help him with the "creative direction" of his home life. His custom sofa—the pi`ece de résistance of his apartment—was a collaboration among his friends Sophie Parker (a florist), her partner Micah Rosenblatt (a furniture designer), and his mom.
The creative process behind the design of the sofa reads like a scene from Los Espookys, the bilingual comedy series Julio stars in with Fred Armisen. "It was fun because Micah and Sophie came over, and I translated for my mom in Spanish. She was gesturing with her hands how the backrest should look. And eventually they found common gestures among themselves. It was like they found a common language."
Julio's contribution to that conversation? "I don’t care about comfort. Just make it as harsh and unusable as you want, as long as it looks good." Fortunately, Micah was determined to make the sofa feel and look good. "He was saying, 'You know, it should be this wide so you can sit comfortably, that way two people can lounge around and watch TV. And I was like, 'I don’t know if any of that is going to happen here. But okay.'" He continues: "But yeah, I’m glad that I could potentially do that. I mean, I don’t have a TV, which is funny because I work in TV and that’s where all my money comes from. Maybe I should get one?"
To no one's surprise, everything in the apartment has a story. Julio bought the ceramic hooks hanging in the living room at Relationships, a design and coffee shop in Clinton Hill. "What I really loved about them is that because they’re ceramic, you just probably shouldn’t use them as hooks, because if you were going to hang a towel or something it would probably break. The humor in that was immediately exciting to me, so I bought a bunch and put them in a cluster there," he says. "The other little ceramic thing was made by a friend of mine, Max Wittert. He’s a comedian. One day he was like, 'Oh look, I made you this!' And it’s just this thing that is not usable for anything. It doesn’t stand. It was a pain in the ass to hang. I love that he was like: 'Oh! I made you this because I felt like you needed it."
It's also not surprising that some of Julio's furniture has a narrative arc. Personification and anthropomorphism are sort of his shtick, after all. When we ask him about the modern wire chair separating his living room from the kitchen, he gives us the plot line of how his sofa became sexy. "I had a different chair there. It was a very soft midcentury chair, but it made the the couch look so sweet. It just made it look so tender and sweet and soft," he says, in a serious tone. "So I told my boyfriend who was here visiting from L.A., 'I don’t like that. I want it to look sexy.' So he said, 'Okay, then we should find it a sexy chair. Give the couch a sexy friend so it will be sexy by association.' So then, we found it that German-looking little thing and we were like: 'GOOD!' Now my couch can show that side of itself." Add Julio's boyfriend to his court of advisers.
Now that Julio is settled, the only challenge he has is to keep himself from buying more stuff. "I’m at capacity with little tables. I’m at capacity with chairs. I’m at capacity with lamps and with clocks that don’t work."
