Preview - Light and Quiet in Manhattan

I first saw the apartment in February. The broker had left a window open and there was snow on the sill. The bones were extraordinary: original cast-iron columns, fourteen-foot ceilings, north light flooding through factory windows that hadn't been replaced since the 1920s. The clients — a couple who collect contemporary ceramics — wanted something that would hold their objects without competing with them.

My instinct was restraint. We stripped back almost everything the previous owners had added and let the architecture speak. The palette came from the building itself: poured concrete floors, raw plaster walls in a warm white we mixed ourselves, blackened steel for the structural additions. The antique pieces came slowly. The French daybed I found at auction in Lyon. The dining chairs from a convent estate sale in the Auvergne.

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