When Wendy Moonan was growing up in Westport, Conn., during the 1960s, no one she knew hired a decorator. It was considered déclassé, Moonan says, to hire a professional when the general wisdom was that “people with taste should be able to furnish and design their own interiors. Period.”
How times have changed, jokes Moonan, whose book, “New York Splendor: The City’s Most Memorable Rooms,” debuted this fall. The tome — a hefty volume with 200 glossy photos — is “a compendium of my favorite private residential rooms in New York City.” She entered countless stunning homes while holding a variety of positions in the design world: At Home editor at Town & Country; writer for House & Garden and Architectural Digest.
“My main criterion was that each project have the ‘wow’ factor — rooms that elicited, from me, gasps of pleasure and admiration,” Moonan says. Here, some highlights.
RHAPSODY IN BLUE
In a three-story apartment in a Fifth Avenue townhouse, designer Alberto Pinto kept 1885-installed “lacy ornamental plasterwork on the salon ceiling” intact through a major renovation.
Pinto took the owners, a couple, to Paris. They shopped for antiques and paintings by Old Masters, which he used in the light blue living room.
There’s a dose of whimsy here, too: Note the golden chair with armrests shaped like seahorses.
SEEING GREEN
The book’s cover is another special space: Joanna de Palma helped a couple furnish an apartment in a late 1800s building on Central Park West with period-appropriate furniture, lighting and art, sourcing green, blue and gold decor off of a teal floral rug circa 1900.
A multiyear project resulted in the library pictured on the cover, containing mostly pieces from the same era as the building. Just look at the diorama behind the couch featuring wooden songbirds in a tree (from 1860), a pendant lamp hanging overhead (also from 1860), a pendant lamp from 1860 and two ebonized library benches with legs like lion paws (late 19th century).
BOOK NOOK
In 1996, the late corporate lawyer and philanthropist Donald Oresman tapped Fairfax and Sammons Architects to update his pied-a-terre at 222 Central Park South. He requested storage for his massive book collection, as well as adequate display space for 1,800 artworks all depicting people reading. The 1905-built co-op itself, called Gainsborough Studios, had housed high-ceilinged artists’ workshops. Oresman asked Richard Sammons for “a Renaissance-style library” with perches for birdwatching over the park; Sammons complied, installing maple bookcases on two levels under a coffered ceiling and a graceful staircase.
CHECK IT OUT
Meet a maximalist. Globetrotting Juan Pablo Molyneux was born in Chile, educated in Paris and had lived in Buenos Aires when the interior designer moved to New York with his wife in 1983. Fast-forward 30 years and dozens of client projects: It’s 2013, and Molyneux finished renovating his own home. The checkered floor, made of black and white marble, is the pièce de résistance on the second-floor landing of Molyneux’s seven-story brownstone on 69th Street between Park and Madison avenues. The walls are lined with specially commissioned panels of lacquered wood, some of which are inspired by a Japanese screen from the 16th century that depicts a naval battle between an invading Portuguese fleet and Japanese defensive forces in 1543.
HAVE A (DISCO) BALL
Architect Williams T. Georgis took an Upper East Side townhouse that dates back to 1910 and turned it into a modern mansion with room for his firm’s offices, too. The renovation, which was completed in 2001, added a glass curtain wall to the back of the house. That, in turn, created a double-height living room that contains contrasting items: zebra-print chairs and velvet sofas alongside baroque antiques and a Roman sculpture. All the better to let light in so that a massive suspended disco ball perpetually glints and gleams. Georgis told Moonan, “The important thing was to create a vibrant, unorthodox mix that surprises and creates both visual and ideological juxtapositions.”
SEEING RED
Until 2014, Adolfo F. Sardina — the Cuban-born interior designer to the likes of Jackie O and socialites like C.Z. Guest and Babe Paley — had an ornate duplex in a Fifth Avenue mansion. He and longtime companion Edward C. Perry decorated it with sumptuous style, dripping with antiques, carpets and portraits by Old Masters. “Adolfo once commented that he preferred portraits over all other art: ‘I can talk to them,’ he said,” Moonan writes. “The cozy foyer (left) was strictly organized, with portraits and pairs (stone statues of Green water carriers, wooden urns, antique sconces and rugs).” Two 17th century paintings hung on the back of the red front door.
The peeks inside usually closed-off New York homes, past and present, are tantalizing.
“I often think of Manhattan apartments and townhouses as secret gardens, hidden from view by building facades behind which flower personal expressions of great taste and sophistication,” architect Robert A.M. Stern writes in the foreword. “Wendy Moonan opens the doors to these private ‘gardens.’ ”