How to Make a New York Apartment Timeless

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In an excerpt from his eponymous new book, David Netto explains how his nostalgia for a lost Manhattan inspired a stunning and thoroughly contemporary haven on the East River

Decorating has few rules, but one of them is this: Prepare to be surprised. Sometimes the biggest projects turn out to be the smoothest rides. Clients who in the beginning seem hardest to please can turn into lifelong friends. And sometimes—sometimes—small projects turnout to be landmarks, the high points in a career. Such is the case with the apartment in these pages, a pied-à-terre for someone who lives in London but spends enough time in New York that they got tired of hotel rooms.

I knew this project would be special the moment I walked in and saw the way the pure white architecture worked in concert with technology, as on a boat (look how those registers interact with the beams). Then there was the blockbuster view. The apartment had one of the strongest identities of any space I have ever seen in New York, as if one were living in aloft at the Cloisters; the modern windows were as strong a design element as the medieval walls. Architect David Hottenroth, with whom I often collaborate, executed a very precise restoration, one of the only new design elements being to change down lights at the outer perimeter from round to square. But the pressure was on me to add something to what was already a masterpiece just sitting empty.

Probably because of its compact size, I could not imagine that this project would become one of the stars of my book (published this month by Vendome). I mean that visually—just look at the pictures by William Waldron—but also mentally, in terms of the Big Idea behind the design. It’s one of the concepts I have most enjoyed thinking through, beginning with a moment of misty sadness as I sat on the stairs and reminisced about a lost New York and ending with big smiles as I wrote the passages about this project for the book, excerpted here. Tiny but mighty, as they say.

In the introduction I spoke of the importance of memory for me in designing. Let’s take a closer look at what that can mean. Fifty-Second Street and the East River is a major nexus of memory for me. I grew up farther north on the Upper East Side, but I learned to swim in the River Club pool; my father always had a fixation about moving to Sutton Place, which my mom would not abide (he finally moved to River House after she died). I remember the talk about that neighborhood alluding to a certain sense of glamour either lost or in the past, and the excitement of seeing Greta Garbo walking home to the Campanile, where she famously lived.

I never gave the Campanile much thought after those days, but not long ago my friend the designer Tom Scheerer sent me pictures of an apartment for sale there that Mica Ertegun had done in 1983 for a very elegant person—a kind of dress rehearsal for the far better-known project she was to work on a few years later for Bill Blass (white architecture, brown English furniture).

I shared these photos with a repeat client of mine who was searching for a pied-à-terre, and she bought the place sight unseen. This is the ultimate sign of trust in one’s decorator, and it has happened only twice in my career.

As long as the trust was flowing, I pitched a very personal concept for the design. This project is about a New York moment in time, right? Past or future? Why choose? Let’s make it a trip through memory of great New York apartments I have known—or known of—with furniture chosen as quotes and allusions to them. It is a map of the history of the city as I remember it, or at least one aspect of it: the remarkable apartments that honed my taste. That’s how we get the commode based on one in the von Bülow apartment, interpreted here by Mike Diaz with guts and brio, using 300-year-old timber. It’s how we get the sleekMies van der Rohe chairs at the round dining table, which I first saw Mark Hampton use in Anne Bass’s apartment. It’s why we have the handsome mahogany guéridon I found in Hudson,New York—which Blass would have loved, and probably eaten at (he once told me emphatically how much he preferred a small dining room), and the long banquettes inspired by Carter Burden’s apartment across the street at River House.

It’s why, amid all the modernism, there is an 18th-century silver tureen; we are channeling the Patiño apartment and all its grand French silver, done in the early 1980s by François Catroux (whose own chrome Nuage tables are here). These are pebbles leading back to the past, at least as I have arranged them. They can tell you what it was like to see those incredible places, even the ones I knew only from pictures. I do miss the people, the great characters who lived like that, who made New York an astounding place to learn about style in the late 1970s and early ’80s.

But we have the future here, too, since any good project belongs to its time. I’m speaking of furniture by Pierre Yovanovitch and Wendell Castle, as well as the view of the new Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms State Park by Louis Kahn at the tip of Roosevelt Island, a sight that reminds us that New York never stands still—and never runs out of ways to surprise us.

From David Netto, by David Netto, © 2023. Published by Vendome.

This story appears in the September 2023 issue of Town & Country. SUBSCRIBE NOW

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