Inside a West Village Apartment That Channels 1920s Glamour

Andrew Sessa

November 13, 2024 at 8:00 a.m.·12 min read

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Art: Luke Edward Hall/The Breeder, Athens

It’s the stuff of New York real estate fairy tales. The owners of the apartment next to yours, the one with the highly covetable views you’ve been lusting after for years, come to you because they want to sell, and they’d like to give you right of first refusal.

You strike a deal, and, the next thing you know—well, the next thing after the lengthy planning process, bureaucratic board approvals, endless permitting, and months and months and months of construction dusting and punch-list punching—you’re living in the home of your dreams, with the skyline vistas to prove it. Pure fantasy? Not if you’re arts marketing entrepreneur turned interior designer Erik Gensler.

“Great design starts with how people live,” Gensler notes, paraphrasing Albert Hadley. “Every great designer, and especially the Brits, talk about comfort, and the comfort of guests.” He brought this thinking to bear on his jewel-toned living room, which centers on a 1970s Guy Lefevre for Ligne Roset lacquered-brass coffee table, from Maison Cedric, the center of which pivots to reveal a hidden bar. “The coup de théâtre for guests is when it spins open, and there’s Champagne on ice inside.” Around the edges of the room, Gensler arranged a Fortuny-upholstered Gustavian settee, a Ferrell Mittman lounge chair, an A. Rudin sofa, a 1940s Jindřich Halabala Spider table, and 18th-century Louis XVI armchairs. The artwork on the back wall is a 2018 David Mitchell painting.
Art: David Mitchell/Jim Kempner Fine Art

Shop out the look of the house here⤵

Gensler and his husband lucked into just such a situation not so long ago, and it allowed them to expand their home into the mirror-image apartment next door. Now, the couple can hardly stop staring at the lights of the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings that twinkle at them nightly from their dining and living rooms on the 15th floor of a landmarked late-1920s Art Deco building in New York’s West Village.

As Gensler sees it, this “once upon a time” story couldn’t have had better timing. “I had just stepped away from my digital marketing business, and had started an interiors firm, mainly working with friends. I saw this apartment as an opportunity to put my design skills and education on view without a client,” the designer and AD PRO Directory member says. He explains that since finishing the space, his home has become something of a calling card, and a touchstone. Now, when he works with clients, “We often find ourselves referencing things here.”

“We were originally going to have a bed in this room but decided instead to make it more flexible,” Gensler explains of this space, a triple threat that serves as a sitting room, a guest room, and an occasional office for his husband. The ottoman’s wheels make it easy to roll to one side, so the herringbone wool–upholstered Ferrell Mittman sleeper sofa can be opened into a bed. The designer found the Victorian ebonized slipper chair at KRB and inherited the pine chest from his mother. The Persian rug, from Kermanshah NYC, is also vintage, while the horse light on the side table came from his childhood bedroom—it’s newly fitted with a lampshade made from a vintage silk sari. Works on the gallery wall above the sofa include an Al Hirschfeld lithograph, John Derian trays, and a 1900 carved Bavarian bird.
Art: © 2024 The Al Hirschfeld Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

And there is much here to reference—and admire—beginning with the architectural envelope. For help combining the two apartments, Gensler turned to architect Jim Joseph, of the Manhattan firm Hottenroth + Joseph, who specializes in historic buildings. The interior designer refers to him as “an absolute genius.”

Though the building dates back nearly a hundred years, both apartments had lost the luster of their historic pedigree, stripped of most all original millwork and other evocative details. So together, Gensler and Joseph worked to reinstate the best period elements, adding broad baseboards and tall crown moldings, wall millwork, and ceiling beams.

One of Gensler’s favorite lines from architect Jim Joseph was, “You’re not going to have an open kitchen, are you?” And indeed no such anachronistic anomaly exists here. Instead, the very much enclosed galley kitchen feels timeless. Paris Ceramics black and white marble tiles set in a harlequin pattern lay the groundwork for cabinets lacquered with Benjamin Moore’s Black Forest Green. An Anne Morris rack above the Lacanche range holds French pots the designer inherited from his mother.

Gensler fitted the kitchen’s green-lacquered cabinetry with hardware by Beata Heuman and topped it with Paonazzo marble counters. Divided from the kitchen by a curtain done in a Helene Blanche striped silk, the pantry sports a Pierre Frey wallpaper; its pattern comprises illustrations of Parisian street signs by artist Jean-Denis Malclès. The designer had the painting of radicchio by Antonello Radi set in a vintage frame.
Art: Antonello Radi

Reached via a narrow hall from the entry, the dining room provides an impressive sense of expansion, thanks to windows overlooking the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings and a ceiling covered in a silvered de Gournay plum blossom pattern. Gensler surrounded the 1930s Art Deco table by Paul Giordano with channel-tufted leather chairs from Ralph Lauren Home. The smokey Murano glass chandelier is by Angelo Donghia.

For the dining room’s working fireplace, Gensler had a 19th-century Breche marble Louis XV–style mantel imported from Paris, pairing it with a French Louis XVI giltwood mirror by Cedric Dupont and a pair of 1920s gilt bronze sconces from Lionsgate Antiques with custom silk lampshades by Blanche Field. The andirons and grate come from Jamb and the brass candelabra from Flare. The designer found the 18th-century portrait of a woman—who he and his husband call Marie—at John Derian. “I love it hanging there,” Gensler says. “It sets the tone of that time in France.”

The scheme also broke down the wall between the apartments to create a more generous sense of space: The former double-duty living-dining areas of the two apartments now each do exclusive duty as the primary bedroom and a formal dining room—the latter exposed to those twinkling skyline views. The other apartment’s primary bedroom, meanwhile, serves as the living room. One former guest room is Gensler’s office, the other, the primary closet. And the second kitchen? It’s an amply sized mudroom—among the holiest of grails of contemporary urban living.

“Jim respected the lines of the rooms, and he followed traditional room layouts, but he designed them in a way that makes them better,” Gensler says, explaining how the architect kept things in check and on point. “He wouldn’t let us do anything that wasn’t something you did in the 1920s. There were a couple of little things I proposed, turning a closet into a bar, for example, and he wouldn’t let that happen. There were no gimmicks.”

Gensler borrowed the idea for the chocolate-colored lacquer walls from the iconic 61st Street apartment of decorator Billy Baldwin. (Gensler ran all his palette choices by color consultant Eve Ashcraft.) The polished surfaces smartly set off a complementary suite of diverse Deco-era pieces: a Paolo Buffa commode from Paris’s Maison Cedric, a brass-engraved mirror from Babou New York, an Italian stool from 1stDibs now sporting a Scalamandré print, and a pair of Decoration Interieur Moderne chairs from Conjeaud & Chappey, newly upholstered in a playful bird print from Prelle. Among the artworks are a Samuel Herman Gottscho photograph and a whimsically colorful piece by Luke Edward Hall.
Art: Luke Edward Hall/The Breeder, Athens

Gensler seamlessly knitted together three hundred years of design history in his home office, where an 18th-century Louis XVI armchair faces a 19th-century curved-back Louis Philippe seat across a 1950s Maison Jansen desk, which he describes as “a core piece” of his collection. The desk lamp is Roman and Williams, and the pier mirror between the windows was custom gilded by furniture restorer Tanja McGiveney. The bird-emblazoned wallpaper in the hallway in the foreground is De Gournay’s St. Laurent, which takes inspiration from antique Chinoiserie panels belonging to Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé.

As the design team, together with general contractor Michael Vella of Vella Interiors, worked to re-establish an Art Deco–inspired, era-appropriate architectural scheme, Gensler spun out his fantasy decorating narrative. “All of the architectural details are authentic to the period when the place was built, but I also wanted it to feel like a timeless Parisian apartment, and to have the glamour of New York, of Bobby Short at the Carlyle,” he says, referring to the pianist and cabaret singer who held court for Manhattan society grandees at the Upper East Side hotel’s Bemelmans Bar in the latter half of the 20th century and the very start of the 21st.

Ultimately, Gensler says of the interior, “I wanted it to feel like it had been here for a really long time. The bathtubs, the mirrors, the lighting, they were all done with the intention of the place not looking like a new apartment.” One set of early acquisitions that helped him turn this nostalgic intention into a present-day reality were the mantels for the two working fireplaces in the primary suite and dining room: one, a 19th-century Breche marble Louis XV–style piece imported from Paris; the other, a custom piece from Chesneys using a John Soanian Greek key motif.

“I like a dark bedroom,” says Gensler, explaining why the one he shares with his husband is clad in a navy blue grasscloth from Schumacher. He had the Thomas O’Brien for Century upholstered bed finished with a Kravet regency stripe fabric by Corey Damen Jenkins. For the bespoke rug, Gensler worked with Crosby Street Studios, and for the customized fireplace he collaborated with Chesneys. A Louis Phillipe mirror from a Paris flea market hangs over an Austrian Art Nouveau mahogany commode attributed to J & J Kohn from Conjeaud & Chappey. The French 1930s glass-and-mahogany vitrine, meanwhile, houses some of Gensler’s collection of Grand Tour artifacts and ephemera.
Art: Hilde Sigal

A former cozy guest room, the couple’s dressing room extends and expands upon the primary bedroom’s blue palette, trading navy Scalamandré grasscloth for Farrow & Ball paint in a lighter Oval Room Blue. The upholstered inserts framed by the millwork are done in a herringbone wool from Jane Churchill. As for the olive-toned merino wool carpet, it’s from Crosby Street Studios, and a Robert Kime textile covers the custom ottoman. The heirloom bentwood Thonet coat rack, which dates back to the 1890s, came from Gensler’s mother.

“I like the idea of going from dark to light,” says Gensler, an idea that can be seen here in the primary bathroom, where black Nero Marquina marble clads the shower walls and door frame, while a pale, broadly striped Pierre Frey paper covers the walls elsewhere. French Art Deco sconces separate the mirrors over the Urban Archaeology basin opposite a 19th-century biedermeier vitrine from Styylish. The black-and-white photograph is by Brassaï, while the sculpted torso on the counter is from Eerdmans New York.

Gensler loves neoclassicism—with a twist—which can be seen in additional finds including the gilded Louis Philippe mirror in the primary bedroom and the Maison Jansen desk in his study. He also knew he wanted a lot of French Deco pieces, “furniture that [looked like it] was inherited through generations.” So the designer accented European favorites from the middle of the 20th century with some key older pieces, including the living room’s Louis XV chairs and heirlooms from his mother, plus newer ones like a 1970s lacquered-brass Guy Lefevre for Ligne Roset coffee table.

Thinking about his work on this home, Gensler turns reflective. “I think I channeled all the energy I’d put into running my company for so many years into this apartment.” And now? Well, after all that hard work, he and his husband now get to enjoy their fairy-tale ending.