LIVING LEGEND

Old meets new in a sensitive update by Michael S. Smith to a storied apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side

-  MITCHELL OWENS

Once an iconic Manhattan apartment building enters the conversation, expect AD100 interior designer Michael S. Smith to fall into a swoon. Not literally, of course, but mentally. A recent project with such an effect was a duplex penthouse atop a soigné shaft of Art Deco limestone on the edge of the Upper East Side. "With the East River below, with its tugboats and pleasure craft, the building has a cinematic quality. You could easily see Fred Astaire living there," the Los Angeles-based talent says, noting that the building once had a private pier for residents' yachts. "It's a pretty magical place-and from the penthouse, you can see the river in three directions: north, east, and south."

His clients, a couple who have relied on his expert eye for multiple residences, initially wanted a perch overlooking Central Park, but Smith's romancing won them over. So did the sweeping enfilades and loftlike volumes of the apartment, which had originally been a triplex stylishly decorated for attorney Wilton Lloyd-Smith by Elsie Cobb Wilson. (Period photographs by the masterful Samuel H. Gottscho can be seen on the website of the Museum of the City of New York.) Artist and fashion designer Gloria Vanderbilt and, later, author Jean Stein called it home, too, in its reduced two-story form. Thrillingly enough, given the tear-down propensities of Manhattan residential real estate, the floor plan and the majority of the period details remained as they had been created. Thus, Smith and his frequent collaborator, architect Oscar Shamamian of Ferguson & Shamamian Architects, only had to bring the kitchen, baths, and primary suite up to contemporary snuff.