What began as an idea for a dress-up party now swallows an apartment whole: an entryway crowded with brochures advertising the RMS Titanic’s voyage from Southampton, England, to New York. A portrait of Captain Edward Smith in summer whites. Metallic foil pooling in the corners of the living room, now a replica of the ocean liner’s Veranda Cafe. Gilt portholes from Amazon flash bioluminescent blue. Since March, Sarah Boll has been building (and living inside) her own Titanic-themed diorama — a life-size, if scaled to fit a Chinatown two-bedroom, two-bath rental. “When I’m not working on it, replacing all the lights and tacking everything up,” she tells me, perched on the white sofa of her Veranda simulation, “I’m probably just in my bedroom, overwhelmed.”
Boll, 38, a model and broker with Douglas Elliman, has watched the movie Titanic maybe 500 times. Over the years, she’s produced a string of side projects orbiting the ship, from “weird, abstract paintings” to dense notes for a Titanic spinoff of Sleep No More (it involved a flooding escape room). The decision to turn her apartment into an immersive theme experience for an audience of one (and her Italian greyhound, Vito) was a natural, if outsize, expression of her fascination. “When I go all out, I really do,” she says. “I don’t stop. It’s a problem.” Boll has found both admirers and disoriented critics on TikTok where she posts Titanic content daily: mini house tours; a fit-check soundtracked to “Can I Call You Rose?”; and behind-the-scenes of a photo shoot dressed as Titanic’s chief baker, Charles Joughin, who was drunk on brandy and survived the wreckage. She films at night, with eerie blue lighting and orange wall sconces that flatter the apartment’s scrappier build-outs. It’s been an all-consuming labor of love — involving countless hours and a lot of double-sided tape. And on Saturday, in a fitting conclusion for an apartment dedicated to a doomed ocean liner, Boll is ready to sink it. “I can only do so much with Titanic,” she says.
So let’s think of this as the good-bye tour. On the Wednesday when I visit — 9 p.m., at Boll’s request — she’s just wrapped up her evening real-estate showings and is tending to her ship. The whole ordeal needs, she says, “constant maintenance.” The coffered white plaster ceiling, wooden wall paneling, and faux-marble checkerboard flooring are erected from renter-safe materials that can be easily removed: peel-and-stick tiles and foam moldings. The stickiness of such materials is fickle, which means her home is constantly unraveling and requires a steady influx of cheap supplies from eBay, Etsy, and Amazon. At one point, building management issued Boll a formal complaint — staff had observed “an unusually high number of packages arriving on a daily basis, far exceeding the typical volume seen for residential use.” She resolved the matter by explaining to her landlord that she was not operating a commercial business on the sly but rather building the Titanic for pleasure.
Boll’s Titanic is carved into multiple zones, each operating with its own internal logic: themes within a theme. Her approach lends it the quality of a folky, vernacular of a theme park. To the left of the entryway is the kitchen, the only undecorated room, which nonetheless includes a lineup of Titanic board games and a blowup Titanic bath toy. Next is Boll’s bedroom, a smallish, enveloping cabin. Over her bed, she’s installed ornate wall panels — gold-and-brown damask fabric, framed by a decorative gold-wood trim. And installed bedside is a porthole, a trompe l’oeil portal to nowhere — the house is full of them, some pitch black and starry. This one emits a blue-Gatorade glow, cleverly achieved through layering fabrics in shades of blue and a small light.
The living room is a pared-back re-creation of the first-class Veranda Cafe — now drenched in phantom lapis light — and Boll’s reconstruction is pleasing: Black strips are tacked along the walls in a trellislike pattern, and the floor is hand-laid compass-rose tiles. There are thick gold curtains, a plush white sofa, a potted palm and ivy (both fake), and a pair of wicker chairs, topped with jaunty illustrations of fictional lovers Jack and Rose. The TV is playing Titanic, which I now only half suspect is for my benefit.
The grand staircase — sort of.
Photo: Laura Bannister
Closer to the front door is a tribute to Titanic’s grand staircase on A-Deck, minus the stairs. A wood-paneled wall, furnished with clocks and hourglasses frames a replica bronze cherub statue brandishing a torch, which once appeared on the central banister. “This is literally flooring,” says Boll, laughing and gesturing at the paneling. “It’s cheap plastic wood with a wooden decal on top that I painted gold.”
In the apartment’s main bathroom, I take an incomplete inventory of film-related objects: a life-size cutout of Leo DiCaprio (a jump scare, in the closet); Titanic on DVD and VHS, both atop the toilet; two framed reproductions of Jack’s nude sketches of Rose; the 2007 Rose Barbie™, unboxed; 11 dollar-store Oscars; a Titanic-shaped jewelry box; a model of Titan, the OceanGate submersible; what appears to be an epoxy resin lamp showing the Titan charting toward the Titanic; multiple Heart of the Ocean necklaces, one inside a glass egg; a mini-safe stuffed with tiny nonfiction Titanic books; a complete facsimile of the Titanic script; gold-framed 3-D models of the iceberg and ship; white iceberg-shaped wall shelves; a miniature wooden music box, which plays “My Heart Will Go On”; a cracked White Star Line ceramic, gifted by a friend (“everything broke on the ship anyway, right?”); a suitcase filled with character costumes, Jack’s handcuffs, the ax Rose broke them with, and two wigs (Jack and Rose, scalped); and stacked Titanic paper napkins at the sink.
But the pièce de résistance of Boll’s buildout is the second bedroom — an abyssal tableau she calls the Sunken Room. (It was described by one TikTok commenter as “a Dexter kill lab.”) I happen to love it, as does Boll, though she notes the door is kept closed at night. The bedroom is now a gigantic, ecstatic, underwater diorama, flooding with navy tulle, other diaphanous fabrics, mirrored flooring, and a strange, glacial light. A side table, its drawers spilling open, coughs up sand and cracked plates. Ship fragments swing. A violin and its bow hang midair, alongside curling sheet music, nodding to the ship’s band who played on as it sank. Boll apologizes that she can’t figure out the fog machine.
The second bedroom is draped in tulle and cast in an eerie blue light.
Photo: Sarah Boll
The en suite bathroom is unusable at the moment.
Photo: Sarah Boll
We walk into the last room, the unusable en suite loo, where every surface is either draped in Warholian metallics or glittering dance-costume fabric, and where fluttering headlines about death tolls are affixed to the walls, giving the effect of a sequined mausoleum. “It’s not supposed to be the iceberg,” Boll explains of the icy-blue space. “It’s supposed to be frozen, or maybe the bottom of the ocean.” I am peering at the just-perceptible names of the 1,500-plus dead, all written in marker against the foil walls by a friend, when the doorbell rings, and Boll jolts — her Hinge date has arrived.
The guy is in his 20s and has been here once before — Boll posted a video of his tour last week. I offer to leave, but Boll insists we both stay. I ask him what he thinks. “My friends, they worked for Mr. Beast,” he tells me. “He does crazy stunts. I just felt like, Oh, this is one of the things they tell me about.”
Vito at rest.
Photo: Sarah Boll
Soon, Boll will raise the curtain on another spectacle. On Saturday, she will host “a small Titanic costume party” (livestreamed, of course, at 9 p.m.). After that, it all comes down. The apartment’s Titanic era is officially ending. Her next immersive makeover — she’s on a roll, now — will be The Wizard of Oz. There will be a huge tornado in whirling fabric and a room dedicated to Oz. “I think it’s color that gets me obsessed,” she says. (With Titanic, it was the ocean’s depths — all those shuddering, luminous blues.) “I was watching The Wizard of Oz a lot as a kid, and I remember Glenda in this beautiful pink bubble. The film starts in black and white, before shifting to color …” she gestures at the monochrome peel-and-stick tiling, “so I can reuse all this flooring.”