A vivid new look for a storied Manhattan townhouse

Old friends from London walk in and ask, “Have I been here before?”’ explains the owner of this early-twentieth-century town house in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. But this sense of déjà vu is no accident. The interior designer on the project was Hugh Leslie, who was also responsible for the clients’ previous home in London. After 11 years in their Victorian villa in Notting Hill (featured in House & Garden in May 2012), the owners relocated to New York with their three school-age children – but took a little of their old home with them. ‘I loved the house Hugh did for us so much, I wasn’t happy to leave at all,’ the owner explains wistfully. The solution was to have the designer bring some aspects of their London home to their Manhattan town house.

To set the tone for their New York incarnation, the couple asked Hugh to replicate the tricolour mosaic floor that had been in their London hallway – a bold, three-dimensional riff on a floor design at the Getty Villa in Los Angeles. Made in India, it uses three kinds of stone: turquoise marble, white marble and dark green porphyry. It leads into the kitchen and family room. ‘Our kitchen and family room in London was unbeatable – this house is much darker and we couldn’t extend the ground floor due to the limited rear garden space,’ says the owner.

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To bring some vigour to the space, Hugh had the kitchen cabinetry custom-made in the style of a colour-blocked Mondrian tableau. ‘We wanted to make it fun and lively, joyful and inviting. It’s fantastic to design sitting rooms, but we all know the kitchen is where everyone ends up hanging out,’ Hugh says. A new vivid blue sofa and a painting brought from London respond to the brightly coloured panels of the cabinetry.

The town house has had several interesting owners over the years, notably the pre-eminent American architect Cass Gilbert, who lived here in the Twenties. Gilbert, who designed such landmarks as the United States Supreme Court building in Washington, ‘had some experimental ideas’, says the owner. These included restructuring the back façade of the house into an octagonal shape to accommodate more windows, thus dictating the shape of all the rear-facing rooms. He also lined the formal sitting and dining rooms with dense neoclassical wood panelling that was typical of the period.

‘I couldn’t tear down the panelling, even though I would have loved to remove it,’ says the owner. Hugh decided to lighten the sitting room’s oak panelling, which extends from the second-floor landing. ‘It was an awful bright orange colour,’ explains the owner. ‘We took to it with bleach to tame the orange and make it a more mellow backdrop, so that we could put up the owners’ wonderful pictures,’ adds Hugh.

New furniture was designed to mix with a few pieces from their London home. ‘A strong palette of colours was needed to balance the dominating wood panelling,’ Hugh continues. ‘The owners have some lovely modern British art, including pieces by Hockney, and works by the American artist Alexander Calder. The punches of colour are a response to the artwork.’

Similarly, the Wayne Thiebaud painting above the chimneypiece and a work by Julie Mehretu above the sofa draw the eye with their vivid colours set against the panelling. A Sandy Jones kilim and pile carpet in a pale grey lends a sense of light and shadow. The former chimneypiece, which looked ‘too dowdy for a smart and glamorous New York town house’, was replaced with one commissioned from Jamb in peacock’s eye marble.