Adriane Quinlan

Adriane Quinlan is a staff writer at Curbed covering New York City real estate and the conversations, characters, and power dynamics that play out around it. Her reporting uses listings, buildings, and neighborhoods as entry points to sideways, second-day angles on stories about culture, money, and status. She writes with a mix of meticulous detail and a close attention to lived-in moments, reflected in her author tagline about covering real estate and eavesdropping on your conversations.

Listing stories and architectural conversions

On the core real-estate beat, Quinlan writes regular listing stories within Curbed franchises like “buy it for the architecture,” “under a million,” and “a truly terrific New York listing.” These pieces highlight idiosyncratic floor plans, conversions of former industrial spaces, and the families and designers who have transformed them, not just asking price and square footage. Recent work includes an East Village factory conversion owned by an architectural scholar and artist, where the narrative centers on a building that once housed an experiment in communal living.

In another feature, she profiles an old mill turned into a compound by a family of designers, focusing on the craft of the renovation and the way the surrounding landscape and waterfall are woven into daily life. Her coverage of a prewar one-bedroom near Millionaires Row marketed at $895,000 uses a single apartment listing to show how proximity to wealth, building history, and layout affect what buyers see as value. Long-form pieces like “The Endless Renovation on West End Avenue” follow owners and contractors through multi-decade projects, documenting the emotional and financial toll of a home that is never quite finished.

Across these stories, she treats listings as narrative scaffolding, explaining how architecture, renovation choices, and domestic routines turn properties into lived-in places.

Street fights and biographies of buildings

Quinlan’s beat extends beyond individual homes to the politics and history embedded in buildings and neighborhoods, often under headings like “street fights,” “neighborhood news,” and “biography of a building.”

She has covered the proposed marina-and-restaurant complex at Transmitter Park, following how a project that promised amenities became unpopular with neighbors who had wanted something as simple as a public bathroom. In Williamsburg, she has tracked the loss of the Music Hall of Williamsburg’s lease, the demolition of the old Crest Hardware building for an 11‑story rental, and the spectacle of the Wythe Diner being lifted out of the neighborhood, treating each as part of a broader arc of redevelopment and cultural churn.

Her piece on “The Curious ‘Katherine’ on Grand Street” uses a strange, long-vacant building suddenly for sale to explore how small anomalies endure or vanish as a neighborhood transforms. In a One Great Story feature on Turtle Bay Gardens, she writes a biography of 19 townhouses surrounding a shared garden, connecting past residents like Stephen Sondheim and Katharine Hepburn to the enclave’s current appeal.

She brings the same method to regional landmarks such as Oheka Castle on Long Island, describing it as a “Xanadu” that has served as a backdrop for television, music videos, and high-end weddings and now faces a sale. In “Can Commercial Real Estate Keep Propping Up Artists?” she reports on how a landlord’s rent hikes on studio tenants intersect with commercial downturns, asking whether large property owners will continue subsidizing creative communities.

These stories show her interest in the long view - how leases, zoning, and ownership fights quietly reorder cultural life.

Celebrity property, interiors, and home life

Quinlan frequently writes about celebrity real estate, using high-profile listings and rentals to illustrate taste, branding, and the mechanics of wealth. Her coverage includes Rufus Wainwright renting out his Montauk Leisurama cottage for the summer, framed by the asking price and the cottage’s specific location near Hither Hills Ocean Beach. She has detailed Libbie Mugrabi’s Bridgehampton estate listing, noting both the tabloid history attached to the property and lifestyle markers like multiple pickleball courts.

Annual roundups of celebrity real estate in 2025 track which properties sold, lingered, or hinted at divorces, treating market movements as a gossip-adjacent chronicle of personal and professional shifts.

Stories about Ellen DeGeneres selling a renovated Cotswolds estate foreground local backlash, the scale of the compound, and niche concerns like room for horses, tying global celebrity behavior back to community-level tensions. In parallel, she covers interior design and domestic space, profiling subjects like Interior Motives host Ben Mora, whose work revolves around reading people through their bedrooms and possessions. She has written about New York teens at home, showing how young people carve out privacy and identity in lofted nooks, repurposed corners, and multi-use rooms.

Pieces on bank branches redesigned to resemble fashion boutiques or co-working spaces, as well as bars staged to evoke Baz Luhrmann’s cinematic style, observe how commercial interiors borrow from domestic and cultural aesthetics. Her reporting on a house designed by the team behind the Inness Hotel, complete with carefully staged objects and finishes, underscores how curated interiors become part of a property’s brand.

Across celebrity estates and everyday apartments, she treats decor, layout, and staging as evidence of how people want to be seen.

Investigations, documentary work, and prior reporting

Quinlan’s approach to real estate is informed by a broader background in narrative and investigative reporting across print, digital, and television.

She previously served as head writer and supervising writer for the nightly news program VICE News Tonight, where she built and led a writing team, shaped the show’s voice and editorial rules, and reorganized workflows during the onset of the COVID‑19 pandemic. In that role, she won three Emmys and helped create projects such as the cooking show Counter Space and the documentary essay “Empty World,” which examined the emerging pandemic through a global lens.

Earlier, she wrote scripts for CNN International, focusing on the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the subsequent administration, and Russia investigations, and reported breaking news and politics for a regional daily newspaper. Her freelance print work has appeared in major national newspapers and magazines, where she has produced profiles and investigations including a portrait of filmmaker Paul Schrader in assisted living, a deep dive into workplace abuse allegations around artist Tom Sachs that contributed to Nike dropping him as a designer, and a reported piece on a New York noise complaint that escalated into a murder.

Other essays cover themes like Mardi Gras in the era of memes and Coca‑Cola’s corporate displays as a lens on colonization and nostalgia. She has also covered New York City for local and citywide outlets, adding granular urban reporting to her portfolio.

Taken together, this experience underlines her comfort with document-heavy research, sensitive interviews, and stories where culture, institutions, and individual lives intersect - skills she now applies to the real estate beat.