PATTERNS of NATURE

Fresh off the opening of her New York showroom, Texan Meredith Ellis brightens her Lenox Hill pied-à-terre in ultra-personal motifs and juiced-up color.

- CELIA BARBOUR

MANHATTANITES EXCEL AT THE ART of living well in compact spaces. Texans, maybe not so much. After all, with 700 times more space per person, they seldom need to sacrifice wide-open expansiveness for trim efficiency. Despite this, designer Meredith Ellis, who grew up on a ranch in Texas Hill Country and is now based in Dallas, took naturally to designing a 1,000-square-foot Manhattan pied-à-terre for herself and her husband and business partner, Hunter, with room enough for their two teenage kids to accompany them north during school breaks and holidays. And she pulled it all off in a New York minute.

A series of vintage strike-offs (fabric color tests) hangs above a breakfast banquette upholstered in Ellis's Agate linen. OPPOSITE: A Frame TV hides in plain sight with original artwork (Paul Klee's Schleusen); the bar's inverted box pleat skirt (Casa Lopez) shrouds Ellis's office essentials from view.

"I had to act fast with this project," says Ellis, who was simultaneously opening the New York branch of her Dallas-based JAMES showroom and had just launched a new, eponymous collection of textiles. It helped that she was on familiar ground, having started her design career in Manhattan working for the legendary Bunny Williams (in the same building that now houses JAMES, no less). That, combined with extensive design experience both with Michael S. Smith and on her own, gave Ellis the confidence to trust her instincts as much as her eye when making on-the-spot decisions-including those involving patterns and furniture pieces of her own design.