Commune Design founder Roman Alonso faced a dilemma when his longstanding northern Californian clients asked him to help them turn a duplex in a grand building on Park Avenue into a home. Ten years before, he had designed the bohemian couple’s house in Marin County, north of San Francisco, drawing on their love of Sweden – specifically Ilse Crawford’s Ett Hem hotel in Stockholm – for the interiors. ‘There’s a relationship between the two places in terms of weather and attitude,’ he observes.
Now, however, they needed a Manhattan base for work and couldn’t see themselves as New Yorkers. One of the owners had grown up on the Upper East Side but ‘escaped’, while the other never imagined living uptown. ‘It was just not her vibe,’ Roman recalls.
The neoclassical building was designed in 1927 by JER Carpenter, one of the most sought-after architects of the time. Although the decor was dated (think 1980s spongework and faux marble), the apartment had excellent bones and retained some original plaster cornices and herringbone-oak floors. Roman saw an opportunity to simplify things, explaining ‘that it would not only make it more modern and casual, but bring it closer to that idea of this Stockholm apartment in New York’.
What's everyone reading?
Recognising that he was far outside his comfort zone, he brought in an expert: architect Elizabeth Roberts, who is known for her work on stately old Brooklyn brownstones. ‘I’ve always admired Elizabeth,’ he says. ‘She minimises detailing to a point where it’s still grand, but has a more comfortable, laid-back attitude. She modernises things without them looking modern.’
‘One of the reasons JER Carpenter apartments are considered so desirable is because they always had gracious floor plans,’ explains Elizabeth. She kept its basic arrangement (with the living room, dining area and library arranged around the stairwell), enlarging the openings between the rooms to create a more unified layout.
The kitchen, however, was a cramped back-of-house space – designed for when families had live-in staff – so they opened it up and worked hard to conceal awkward columns and pipes within new cabinetry and panelling to create a room that felt logical, symmetrical and functional.
While the aesthetic is clearly Scandinavian, Roman didn’t want it to be too ‘on the nose’, so brought in a rich mix of furniture, lighting and textiles. Most of the lights are from Woka Lamps in Vienna, while much of the furniture is by English makers such as George Smith and Alfred Newall, whose wife Tess also created the wallpaper for the entrance hall.
The rugs are Swedish archival patterns that Commune recreated with Doris Leslie Blau, and there are iconic pieces by Finn Juhl, Poul Henningsen and Kaare Klint. All the paintings are Swedish, sourced from Lief and Diesnt & Dotter in New York. Rooting the home in its location are benches by George Maker of Sawyer Made in Pennsylvania, as well as other pieces from Hudson-based Chris Lehrecke and Black Creek Mercantile in upstate New York.
The dining room is wrapped in a jolly red-and-white gingham fabric from Classic Cloth, which serves as a bold declaration of intent for Roman’s clients. ‘Most people have expectations of what a New York apartment looks like,’ he says. ‘She was a bit of an outsider coming in, and she wanted people to walk in and see her personality, perhaps get to know her better.’
The colour doesn’t stop there, with Farrow & Ball’s ‘Inchyra Blue’ defining the library. Commune uses a lot of Farrow & Ball paints in its Californian projects, but the colours are transformed in New York. ‘It’s the light,’ explains Roman. ‘That blue is pretty striking; it’s almost like being ensconced in velvet.’
It took time to persuade his client to agree to the colour – ‘she was afraid of having a dark apartment’ – but Roman argued that, as there are no views, just other buildings and rooftops, everything should turn inward. ‘I wanted to make it all hug you,’ he says. A little slice of Scandinavia in the Big Apple, this home certainly has hygge energy, but without any of the twee connotations. communedesign.com; elizabethroberts.com
