Imagine This City

There's a certain fantasy of how to live in New York. Here's what it looks like.

-  DAVID NETTO

Decorating has few rules, but one of them is this: Prepare to be surprised. Sometimes the biggest projects turn out to be the smoothest rides. Clients who in the beginning seem hardest to please can turn into lifelong friends. And sometimes sometimes-small projects turn out to be landmarks, the high points in a career. Such is the case with the apartment in these pages, a pied-à-terre for someone who lives in London but spends enough time in New York that they got tired of hotel rooms.

I knew this project would be special the moment I walked in and saw the way the pure white architecture worked in concert with technology, as on a boat (look how those registers interact with the beams). Then there was the blockbuster view. The apartment had one of the strongest identities of any space I have ever seen in New York, as if one were living in a loft at the Cloisters; the modern windows were as strong a design element as the medieval walls. Architect David Hottenroth, with whom I often collaborate, executed a very precise restoration, one of the only new design elements being to change downlights at the outer perimeter from round to square. But the pressure was on me to add something to what was already a masterpiece just sitting empty.