With Flying Colors

A New York apartment shifts out of neutral and into a dynamic palette with the help of designer Patrick Mele.

- By Ingrid Abramovitch

Picture an apartment on Manhattan's Museum Mile and an image comes to mind: a classic six in a prewar co-op, filled with antiques, plump furniture, and blue-chip art. But when Sara Tayeb-Khalifa arrives at her home near Fifth Avenue, she enters an environment unlike her neighbors or anyone else's, for that matter.

Her living room's espresso hue acts as a foil to an explosion of color-from the Vladimir Kagan sofa in an electric-blue velvet to color blocked silk draperies in six jewel tones, from cobalt to yellow to fuchsia. The kitchen's ceiling and walls are covered in a pattern of ripe oranges, her bedroom is done up like a fantasy garden, and art is everywhere, as are intriguing objects and scores of books that spill off surfaces.

If the apartment resembles anything, it is Tayeb-Khalifa herself the rooms are as vivacious as her outfits, sparkling with humor and curiosity. "I'm a hummer, and whenever I come home I hum that Elvis Presley song 'Welcome to My World," she says. "Do you know the lyrics? 'Welcome to my world/Won't you come on in? / Miracles, I guess / Still happen now and then. It's a very bright, very happy home.