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One Throuple Had Three Separate Design Tastes. How Did They Manage a Renovation?
| David Poaster Wallace | 12/17/25 |
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Date: December 17th, 2025 2:55 PM Author: David Poaster Wallace Skip to Main Content Skip to... Select WSJ Barron's MarketWatch IBD WSJ | Buy Side
WSJ Logo One Throuple Had Three Separate Design Tastes. How Did They Manage a Renovation?
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David Gobberdiel, left, Ryan Tungate, right, and Michael Cowell are co-owners of a 4,000-square-foot duplex in the city’s Northalsted neighborhood. Real Estate Luxury Homes One Throuple Had Three Separate Design Tastes. How Did They Manage a Renovation? After buying a ‘plain vanilla’ box, a Chicago trio brought in an interior designer who blended their aesthetics and added elements like a moody den for socializing and a three-person bed
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David Gobberdiel, left, Ryan Tungate, right, and Michael Cowell are co-owners of a 4,000-square-foot duplex in the city’s Northalsted neighborhood. By Vaishnavi Nayel Talawadekar | Photography and video by Lucy Hewett for WSJ Dec. 17, 2025 12:00 pm ET
When corporate strategist David Gobberdiel and pharmacist Ryan Tungate started living together in Chicago in 2013, they never intended to open their relationship, let alone their home, to a third partner. But when they met consultant Michael Cowell, 35, through mutual friends in the summer of 2018, things took an unexpected turn.
“We just clicked,” says Gobberdiel of the instant connection. The throuple, which is a committed romantic or sexual relationship between three people, took things slow at first. Gobberdiel and Tungate, both 37, lived separately from Cowell, who was consulting for a Germany-based client and dividing his time between Germany and Chicago. When he was in Chicago, he still split his time between his home and his partners’. By the time Covid triggered a lockdown in Chicago in March 2020, the constant shuttling had become impractical, and it simply made sense for all three to move in together—preferably somewhere bigger.
Anticipating an extended lockdown, the throuple moved quickly to find a home, ultimately purchasing a new 4,000-square-foot duplex with a 2,000-square-foot roof deck, four bedrooms, and 3½ baths in Chicago’s Northalsted neighborhood for $1.71 million in June 2020.
All three became deeded owners of the condo, but they also drew up a private agreement to manage how ownership would work in practice. The agreement covered expenses, the sale of a share, and major decisions. The contract remains flexible, letting them adapt as their lives evolve and ensuring co-ownership stays harmonious.
A dining area with a long dark wooden table, white upholstered bench seating, and patterned wallpaper. Designed to seat up to 10, the kitchen banquette is ideal for hosting friends, but more commonly serves as Tungate’s workstation. Kitchen with white cabinets, marble countertops and backsplash, a brass range hood, three pendant lights, and an island with three bar stools. Mornings begin in the kitchen, where light tones and a sunny spirit set the stage for coffee and work. The home offers many places to unwind, but the kitchen banquette ranks among the best—intimate for a few, yet expansive enough for many. Real-estate agents are noticing more throuples and polycules buying homes together, often with everyone’s name on the deed. “Monogamy in this economy?” says Kathy “Kiki” Sloan, an employing broker with Property Dominator in Denver. She has seen a steady uptick in multipartner buyers treating shared ownership as both a romantic and financial move. Her advice: Get the paperwork sorted early. It should include a cohabitation plan and, ideally, an estate plan. Wendy Newman, a California-based real-estate agent with Wesely & Associates, adds that polyamorous families have been buying homes together for decades, but today more are “out” from the start and set up ownership structures that support everyone. Flexible layouts, with extra rooms, double primary bedrooms, accessory dwelling units and adaptable spaces are increasingly popular, she says.
Designers are taking note, creating homes that balance privacy and togetherness for throuples and polycules, a group of people involved in consensual, interconnected, non-monogamous relationships. Common Accounts, a design studio based in Madrid and Toronto, designed a cabin retreat in Ontario, Canada, with a stepped floor plan that carves out distinct zones, including two beds, an Olympic queen and a twin, so the trio of owners have a choice of sleeping arrangements.
The men contracted with interior designer Jennifer Kole of Jenami Designs for a design fee of around $405,000, including furnishings. The en-suite bathroom has a 7-foot-by-4.5-foot shower with multiple shower heads, plus a free-standing soaking tub, ensuring no one is left waiting their turn. The Tri-Pod Bedroom, designed by London-based Scott Whitby Studio, is a boudoir designed for a throuple in South London. It reimagines the traditional bedroom with a multilevel format comprising a three-person bed on the lower level and a mezzanine with two bedrooms for reading and relaxing above, giving each partner their own space while maintaining a sense of closeness.
Product designers are also exploring intimacy through form. New York-based furniture designer Kouros Maghsoudi created a sculptural bed called Hug, designed to comfortably accommodate up to three partners.
Applying that kind of approach to their own home, however, proved a different story for Gobberdiel, Tungate and Cowell. “It was literally just a plain vanilla box,” says Tungate. To them, the shortcomings hardly mattered. With a bit of work, they were confident they could make the space feel cozy, sexy and tailor-made for gatherings. That is, until a week later, when they set out on a four-hour furniture-shopping expedition, only to return with absolutely nothing because they couldn’t agree on anything.
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The bedroom's centerpiece is a made-to-order, 96-inch-by-96-inch mattress from Big Mattress Co., paired with ready-made Alberta King linens. “We were like, this is going to take forever,” says Cowell. It took them three years to find the professional help they needed to give the home some soul. In June 2023, a mutual acquaintance led them to interior designer Jennifer Kole of Jenami Designs, based in Chicago.
Designing for a couple is tricky enough. Add a third partner, and it is like a high-stakes game of design Tetris. Gobberdiel leans traditional, Cowell lives for plants and curios, and Tungate favors clean, minimal lines. The solution? A layered aesthetic; warm, contemporary and balanced. Nowhere is that more obvious than in the den, once an awkward back room and now the house’s buzzing social hub. Half of it is a moody, deep-blue home theater. The other half is Gobberdiel’s office by day and a hangout zone by night.
“It just feels like a chic cocktail lounge. And when we have folks over, it’s a very comfortable place to kind of peel off and talk, have a drink, or just gossip,” says Gobberdiel.
If the partners’ design opinions were loud downstairs, they went full-throttle upstairs in the primary bedroom. It is a hotel-like retreat draped wall-to-wall and crowned with a dramatic wallpapered ceiling, where three personalities somehow reach a truce.
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Living room with three gray armchairs, a fur rug, green glass coffee tables, and dark wallpaper with gold animal patterns. Deep-green panther-print wallpaper sets the tone, built-in shelves show off Cowell’s growing collection of curios and plants, and plush seating, affectionately dubbed “the gossip circle,” anchors one half of the den. A darkly painted living room featuring a fireplace with a painting above it, a sectional sofa, a wingback chair, and gold accent lighting. This side of the den becomes a deep-blue home theater designed for immersive viewing. Kole said the bed challenged her most. “At first, I thought, OK, I know you guys are all in a relationship, but do you really sleep in one little bed?” she says. “They were like, ‘yeah,’ and I was like, ‘oh no, we need to change that.’ ”
The room’s centerpiece is a custom three-person bed, complete with a made-to-order, 96-inch-by-96-inch mattress. Bedtime follows a carefully considered rhythm: the TV swivels to one side, keeping the glare off the other two partners while allowing Cowell—settled in his armchair at the far end—to unwind with his usual space and physics documentaries before drifting off to sleep.
The home’s color changes and the available light gradually fades as one moves through the spaces. “Our movement is kind of like that, too,” Gobberdiel says. “We start our day in the lighter-toned front areas such as the living room and kitchen and later transition to our respective offices toward the back.” Cowell also has a workspace upstairs. Tungate often works from the 10-seater kitchen banquette or at his own workplace downtown.
By night, the throuple drifts into the darker corners of the home—a soothing prelude to bedtime—or heads out to the 2,000-square-foot rooftop terrace garden, cultivated by Gobberdiel and Cowell. With over 70 plants and spaces that reflect each partner’s personality, the home is a living, breathing expression of the trio.
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