Park Avenue from East 57th to 96th Street is as much a literary and cultural allusion as it is an address. With a meticulously landscaped median, the Manhattan boulevard is a two-mile gauntlet of elegant brick apartment buildings in shades from buff to earthen, with liveried doormen and Renaissance Revival and neo-Gothic exterior ornament. Designed largely between the Gilded Age and the Great Depression by such architects as Emery Roth and Rosario Candela, this stretch of rarefied real estate is mostly void of the quaint rowhouses and twee storefronts found on nearby Madison or Lexington. The writer Gay Talese immortalized it in the 1970s as "the Park Avenue of poodles and polished brass; it is cab country, tip-town, glassville, a window washer's paradise."
As such, strolling the neutral-hued brick canyon of Park Avenue on an early summer afternoon, it is the architectural outlier that beguiles: On a corner in the 90s stands a stark white four-story structure, stuccoover-brick-a cheery cube that cuts through the staid neighborhood like a splash of Aperol. With nearly 40 steel-framed windows in its stocky facade, it seems equal parts fortress and aerie.
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How do you cozy up a Manhattan high-rise? Call designers Hendricks Churchill.
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ELLE DECOR partners with designers Christine and John Gachot to refresh an iconic lounge at a New York institution, the Metropolitan Opera House.
The Empire Strikes Back - A 19th-century gem in Cambridge, Massachusetts, gets a tour-de-force restoration thanks to Frances Merrill of Reath Design.
Is it possible to simultaneously go back in time and leap forward? This was the challenge a couple set for themselves upon purchasing a salmon-pink 1869 house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, not far from Longfellow House, the National Historic Site that served as George Washington's headquarters during the revolution. We loved all the beautiful old details of this house, the homeowner says.
Just Like That, But Cheaper. -One writer tried to replicate a classic ELLE DECOR interior in his apartment. Could he do it for $500?
It was all about the green curtains. In 2008, to my great surprise, I was offered a ninemonth fellowship based in New York City. I had lived there twice before, both times unsuccessfully, meaning I had failed to create any kind of significant social life, and so this was a chance not only to do research for my new novel, but also an opportunity to get things right. I swore I wouldn't let the city break me a third time.
And How! - Decorator Nick Olsen transforms a Sag Harbor home into a Hamptons retreat with an irreverent humor.
If you must go to the Hamptons, however-because it is devilishly good fun, after all-you may notice an apparently modest, low-slung cottage on Sag Harbor's Main Street and think, with a comfortable sort of feeling, Now that is how a house should look. Nestled amid the Botox bars, helipads, and club-staurants, it could almost set the sordid world aright both a rebuke and a solution to the chaos that surrounds it. A real home.
