When Rachel Brosnahan and her husband, actor Jason Ralph , teamed up with Washington, D.C.-based designer Zoë Feldman on their pre-war classic six in Manhattan ( featured in AD's April issue ) most of the major decisions fell to Brosnahan. The phones, however, were Ralph's domain.

His objection to modern handsets was partly aesthetic. Against the bones of the couple’s pre-war apartment, contemporary cordless sets simply didn't belong. But his resistance ran deeper than design. "He's very pro dumbphone at a moment when the smartphone is taking over the world," says the The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel star. The solution: a pair of rotary classics dating to the Eisenhower administration—a moss-green coiled-cord number anchoring their stripe-swathed entry hall, and a glossy black model perched in the breakfast nook. Both date to the 1950s—early wall phones produced by Western and Northern Electric.

The Marvelous Mrs.…