EYE IN THE SKY

How do you cozy up a Manhattan high-rise? Call designers Hendricks Churchill.

- Camille Okhio

The designers Heide Hendricks and Rafe Churchill are known for a visual language that pulls the past into the present. Call it Shaker with a twist. Based in Connecticut's rural Litchfield County, their ELLE DECOR A-List firm, Hendricks Churchill, is a go-to for renovations of period architecture-updated country farmhouses, prewar city apartments, 19th-century brownstones-infusing them with a traditionalism that works in a contemporary context.

But to judge from their latest project, the duo who are a married couple-aren't afraid of jumping out of the history books and several stories off the ground. When a young family approached them to decorate their apartment in a new-build high-rise on New York's Upper East Side, all they could think of was the modernist architecture in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. "It was a space that could have been designed by Howard Roark-and the polar opposite of our style," Hendricks says. "It was almost surreal."