FOR Marina Abramovic, a 63-year-old Yugoslavian-born performance artist, the star is a potent symbol, and it makes frequent appearances in her work. Ms. Abramovic, whose retrospective, “Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present,” opens this month at the Museum of Modern Art, constructed and set a large star on fire in an early piece, lying down inside it. During another widely publicized performance, she carved a star around her navel in what she describes as an anti-Communist act.
“I come from a Communist country,” she said. “The star is on my birth certificate and on every book in the school — they remind me of the restrictions of freedom.”

So it’s no accident that the house she owns in Malden Bridge, N.Y., in Columbia County, is star-shaped.

IN the living room of the apartment in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, that Robert Highsmith, 27, shares with his girlfriend, Stefanie Brechbuehler, 32, and their standard schnauzer, Kingsley, is a weathered Eames lounge chair that once belonged to Mr. Highsmith’s grandfather and still smells faintly of cigarette smoke.
A painting by his grandmother, an abstract composition in blue, yellow and gray, hangs on the bedroom wall. And down the hall in the dining room — which doubles as an office for Workstead, the architecture and furniture firm that the two run — is a chandelier Mr. Highsmith made out of old machinist lamps and metal joints.
Among friends, he and Ms. Brechbuehler are known as sophisticated pack rats who surround themselves with objects that have a story to tell.
“When I bring something home that’s new, or if I’m not sure where it came from, I find it loud, distracting,” Mr. Highsmith said.

Ms. Brechbuehler, who is Swiss, added: “In Switzerland, if you buy a pair of shoes, you’ll have them for 10 years. They have a different attitude toward consuming, and I think Robert and his family do, too.”

The couple, who met as architecture students at the Rhode Island School of Design, have been living here since October, about a month after they started Workstead. Mr. Highsmith was already doing freelance design work, but Ms. Brechbuehler had a job at Gensler, a large architecture firm, and when she quit to work with Mr. Highsmith, she said, friends were aghast.

“I was told: ‘You’re crazy! So many people are losing their jobs, how could you do this at this time?’ ” she said. “But I think the more the recession drags on, the more people are feeling free to try different things.”

Because they needed a space where they could live and work, they moved out of the 387-square-foot East Village studio where they had been living together for a year, and into this 850-square-foot floor-through one-bedroom apartment, which they rent for $2,000 a month, $150 more than they had been paying.
“The studio was an exercise in collecting only what really matters,” Mr. Highsmith said, but this apartment is also a carefully edited “collection of things inherited, gathered and assembled.”