Bachelor Lair, Undone

IT was New York in the 1970s, and Tom Fallon’s bachelor pad didn’t need furniture — the absence of furnishings signified an on-the-go, unencumbered lifestyle. For guests who felt the need to sit, carpeted risers with mattresses provided a chic alternative.

“It was a very fashionable apartment,” said Mr. Fallon, a retired fashion executive with the Carlisle Company, whose former apartment — a one-bedroom at 33 Perry Street in the West Village — was featured in the Home section of The New York Times in 1977. Mr. Fallon, who then worked for the designer Bill Blass, found the apartment in 1968, after a girlfriend, a fashion model, visited the place on a shoot and tipped him off. At the time, he paid $225 a month for the rent-controlled apartment.

“The living room was about 20 by 20, with a very baronial fireplace and a leaded glass window that overlooked this magic garden,” he said. “I moved in and decorated it to my specifications.” That included a nine-foot-long burl walnut table to match the scale of the window and a wall-mounted shelf unit, both custom made by the interior designer Jay Spectre.

In photographs taken at the time, Mr. Fallon is dressed in a sweater and sitting casually on one of the three risers that dominate the back corner of the living room. The top platform is actually a carpeted mattress; in a nearby alcove is another bed, and a third can be found in his bedroom. That’s a lot of beds for one person. Was Mr. Fallon running a swingers’ club?

“It was an inventive way to furnish the apartment without a lot of money,” he said. “There was a European sense to the way it was put together, where I had a grand space that I used in a spare, modern way.”

He took advantage of the open living space to entertain large groups. “I threw a big dinner party for Bill and his society pals one time,” he said, referring to Mr. Blass. “I could get a few hundred people in that room.”

Overflow crowds poured into the back garden. At the time, St. John’s in the Village Episcopal Church, on Waverly Place, owned the garden and several 19th-century brick town houses that faced it, including 33 Perry Street, part of a complex known as St. John’s Colony.

The church bought the properties in the 1920s to establish an artists’ colony. Interior fences were removed, creating a common garden, according to the Rev. Lloyd E. Prator, the rector at St. John’s.

“All would have gone well, except for the unfortunate events of October 1929,” Father Prator said, referring to the stock market crash. Cash-strapped and saddled with mortgages, the church “went from being a beneficent landlord to a slumlord,” unable to afford proper upkeep, he said.

The writer Mary Cantwell lived in St. John’s Colony in the mid-1950s with her husband in a small apartment at 224 West 11th Street, paying $120 a month. In her memoir, “Manhattan When I Was Young,” she wrote about the apartment, “The sink leaked, and the only way I could ever get it fixed was to tell Father Graf, the minister, that I was afraid something terrible would happen to his ceiling.”

In the late 1970s, the church began to sell the houses. Carl Pucci, an architect, bought 33 Perry Street in 1982 and moved into the apartment with his second wife directly above Mr. Fallon. Soon the family expanded when a son of Mr. Pucci’s wife joined his two children from a previous marriage in the house. And Mr. Pucci wanted to expand into Mr. Fallon’s apartment to create a duplex.

The men worked out an arrangement that would allow Mr. Fallon to stay in the building, but move into the street-facing apartment on the same floor.

Forsaking modernism, Mr. Fallon decorated his new apartment with worn leather chairs, overstuffed furniture and Oriental rugs — what he described as a “Cambridge” look.

Mr. Pucci, meanwhile, converted the bachelor apartment into a bedroom suite for his children.

In July, the architect showed a reporter how Mr. Fallon’s old bachelor lair had changed in the intervening years. Except for the large leaded window overlooking the garden, it was virtually unrecognizable.

“This is the kids’ TV hangout space,” Mr. Pucci said, pointing to the alcove where one of Mr. Fallon’s three beds had sat. Now the space has a built-in cherry wood daybed and hidden storage for board games and toys.

And what of those raised platforms? Ripped up decades ago, Mr. Pucci said.

The room is now occupied by Mr. Pucci’s stepson, Noah Levine, who recently graduated from Princeton with a degree in art history and is temporarily matriculating at 33 Perry.

Mr. Pucci’s youngest son, Joe, 14, has Mr. Fallon’s old bedroom. He was at school on this afternoon, but his older brother, Sam, 22, happened to be home. Sam explained that the room had been passed down over the years; before it belonged to Joe it was his, and he inherited it from his sister, Emma, 25. “The walls were sea foam green and there was all this leftover girly stuff,” he said.

No more. The Kobe Bryant Fathead roll-on graphic slam-dunking up one wall suggests that Joe is a Lakers fan and a jock (an observation confirmed by his father). And the candy-cane-colored rug, which Mr. Pucci let his son pick out, is evidence of a bold visual style.

“The only wall color we could find that worked with the rug was this yellow,” Mr. Pucci said. “I think it’s called sand.”

“No,” Sam said. “I think it’s more gaudy, like Mellow Yellow.”

Mr. Pucci said he still rents the front apartment, though not to Mr. Fallon, who moved to the Upper West Side in 2005. Fittingly, Mr. Fallon changed fields; he is now an interior decorator. St. John’s Church, meanwhile, has sold all its property except for the church, the rectory, a counseling center and a small piece of the garden.

But the vision of a creative community has not been totally lost. In the last few years, some of the town houses that were part of St. John’s Colony have been bought by artist types, like Billy Joel. They’re just not the starving kind.