Joshua McHugh An early Instagram convert, New York designer Alyssa Kapito built her online following—now 191,000 strong—with a string of seductive images of rooms in monochromatic creamy whites. Clients followed, including a family who hired her to renovate their Upper West Side apartment just months before the pandemic hit the city. “We signed on just a few months before everything got crazy,” says the ELLE DECOR A-List designer, “and schemed most of the rooms in a work-from-home setting, using renderings and Zoom to get our intention across.” The wife, a jewelry designer, connected with Kapito on Instagram. But it was the husband, a managing partner at a venture capital firm, who gets the credit for getting the project done during a pandemic. In early 2020, weeks before most people were expecting a shutdown, he asked Kapito to measure and photograph the space—just in case. “It was something at the time I couldn’t even fathom,” says Kapito of the looming lockdown, “I honestly thought he was overreacting.” But it was a good thing she obliged: New York indeed shut down and Kapito and her team couldn’t access the apartment for months, “but having the measurements and lots of pictures saved the project,” she says.