Close your eyes and picture a classic Fifth Avenue apartment overlooking Central Park. You’re seeing polished mahogany, perhaps? Lots of mirrors and lacquer? Slabs of marble, and bronze, maybe, and brilliantly gilded just about everything else? All sorts of materials, in fact, that aren’t warm, practical, easygoing, soft, or remotely family-friendly. Which is why, for this young family of four who yearned for comfortable, functional space, architect Peter Pennoyer closed his eyes and envisioned a major reconfiguration of their new apartment’s rooms and capped his dazzling refit with a grand enfilade of stately park-view windows. Simultaneously, designer Steven Gambrel closed his eyes and imagined fumed-oak flooring, patterned carpets, knotty-pine walls, strategically allocated high-gloss paint—and all of that with a 1950s subtext: an inventive fusion of the rough with the refined.
“And yet,” the husband says, “our friends are amazed at how comfortable it is. I think people can spend whatever they want, but if it doesn’t feel like home, well...why?”
And because their rented apartments never felt like home, these nonnative New Yorkers with two little boys were “looking for permanence,” says the wife. “And this was a duplex apartment,” her husband adds, “so it felt like a house. But we knew we didn’t want anything formal.”
Read more at: https://www.elledecor.com/design-decorate/house-interiors/a7882/steven-gambrel-upper-east-side-apartment/