Ain't It Grand?

After two decades, Dallas designer Jean Liu refreshes the historic Manhattan studio apartment she bought when she was just 22.

- Camille Okhio

In 1903, Gilded Age starchitect Stanford White of McKim, Mead & White completed a Manhattan mansion for the newspaper publisher and politician Joseph Pulitzer and his family. While the entire townhouse was spectacular, particular attention was paid to the parlor, and its high ceilings were embellished with decorative plasterwork depicting putti, tambourines, fruit, acanthus leaves, and urns.

A century later, Jean Liu, then 22, was at home in Dallas perusing the online classified property ads. "I am a serial real estate voyeur," she says. She had recently earned a master's degree in theology from Harvard and always dreamed of moving to New York City full-time to be with her friends. It wasn't to happen. Liu was needed at home to pitch in with her father's lighting and ceiling-fan business. Litex Industries, which he founded in 1980 after moving to the United States from Taiwan.

Nevertheless, in the classifieds she spotted a listing for a studio near Central Park on the Upper East Side. The ornate parlor that White had designed for the Pulitzers was now an 800-square-foot flat-possibly the world's most glamorous one-room home. "I saw it on a Thursday and by Saturday I was flying to New York to view it," says Liu.