Garbo's at the Door

A legendary New York apartment had a new owner. Should the decorator change everything? Or nothing at all? Stephen Sills talks.

- BY RACHEL TASHJIAN

"I don't usually ask who did someone's apartment, says Donna Rosen, the art collector and philanthropist. "First of all, I can always tell-Mario Buatta, Billy Baldwin. But I think it's gauche to ask" She pauses. "Gauche. Wow, I haven't used that word in a long time."

"It's a wonderful word," offers interior designer Stephen Sills. "We should all use it more often."

"But I have asked about two people's apartments," Rosen says. "And Stephen did both of them."

We are sitting in Sills's latest pièce de résistance: Rosen's Sutton Place floor-through, which has extraordinary windows looking out on the East River, currently under a pale gray sky. It's his second project for Rosen, but despite their well-established relationship, this new home was no simple task.

The apartment came with almost unbearably chic provenance: It was once the abode of Greta Garbo. Yes, the home to which she infamously retreated upon her retirement in the early 1940s, which she bathed in pale pink silk and blond wood walls that conjured her fine-boned Swedish chill in architectural form. The sanctuary from which she occasionally emerged to run an errand in her Belgian loafers and quilted coats, and the paparazzi would seek her out with safari animal fervor.

The actress lived in the home for almost four decades. Though she died in 1990, her heirs kept the property in high Garbo style, if not condition, and an owner between Garbo and Rosen left many of the details from Billy Baldwin's decoration of the space intact, including that orangey wood and the Fortuny silk in the bedroom that Baldwin cooked up after Garbo said she wanted the room painted the color of candlelight glowing under a lampshade.