A Beaux Arts Apartment in NYC Is Transformed Into a History-Referencing Pied-à-Terre

It appeared to be the perfect apartment. Nannette Brown’s repeat clients, a Wall Street couple with five older children and a primary home in Connecticut, were seeking a city base and found it in an iconic Upper West Side building known for its Beaux Arts style, embellished with French windows, ornate ironwork balconies, and Louis XVI-style grilles and scrollwork. The only issue? The apartment was rife with asbestos. “We thought we were inheriting one thing but we had to drill it down to its essence,” shares Brown, an AD PRO Directory designer. The unwanted discovery meant starting from scratch. “By the end of the asbestos process, the entire apartment had been stripped down to concrete, and you felt like you were standing in a hole.”

Yet optimism prevailed—and the early disappointment paved the way for a far more relevant floor plan. Like many older apartments, the family’s new place featured what Brown describes as “a warren of rooms: room on room on room.” The original floor plan was essentially a “centrifuge for both the dining and kitchen areas, the living room, and also the primary bedroom. And nobody wants a primary bedroom off of the heart of the house,” says the designer. “So the first objective was to make a space that was more rational.”

The nearly yearlong abatement process also allowed the “extremely health-minded” family to envision an entirely new space, sprawling at 4,000 square feet, with a focus on wellness and a restoration of the architectural details they’d originally been sold on. (As Brown points out, “Every single wall came down in the apartment in the end.”) The designer collaborated with environmental biologists and electricians as well as other pros hired to advise on sustainable, health-grade products.

From a design perspective, the edict was a layered home respectful of the building’s storied roots. Sourcing visits spanned the globe from Paris’s treasure-filled flea markets to Stockholm’s Bukowskis auction house. The wife, says Brown, “didn’t want to feel like the apartment was born yesterday. She wanted it to feel like she was enjoying the architectural elements of an old apartment, whether it be in New York or Paris.” Consider the original 18-to-20-inch base moldings in the living room, an element the client had first fallen in love with but that were all but wiped out. “We tried to be as authentic as possible, all while affording us the license to interpret something different, like the moldings [appearing to be] pouring onto the wall,” says Brown of her technique, “a more modern interpretation of all the formal moldings that had been there.”