Growing up in the intense world of competitive dance, Jeanine Mason admired Monica Santayana, a “tough” older team member. Monica saw Jeanine as a talented little sister, but their mutual admiration didn’t begin until years later, when Jeanine won the fifth season of. So you think you can dance and started in shows like Grey’s Anatomy And Rosewell, New Mexico“I’m so proud of what she’s accomplished,” Monica says. “I’ve followed her success. It’s like she’s one of my children, but she’s not.”

Jeanine (right) and Monica pose together among tropical flowers.

Monica has built an impressive creative career of her own, co-founding the interior design firm Moniomi with her husband Ronald Alvarez, so she was Jeanine’s first port of call when she bought an early 20th-century Manhattan apartment. “I asked, ‘Moni, who in New York can help me with this?’ Because at the time I didn’t think she would do it from Miami,” Jeanine recalls. “But she said, ‘Shut up, I’ll do it.'”

Collaborating on the renovation was a full-circle moment for the two friends, who had previously flown in together from Florida to attend dance programs at Lincoln Center, just blocks from Jeanine’s new home. “I have a real affinity for the Upper West Side,” she says. “And I love old things. My main task was to find a place that we could maintain and spruce up and do justice to. I hoped it would be a brownstone. I hoped it would be pre-war. I hoped it would be near Central Park. And then this place came along.”