Lenox Hill Townhouse

In both scale and intricacy, this town house is the studio’s most ambitious project to date, a seven-floor fantasia that took as many years to be realized but appears as if to have existed on this block for generations. While its Beaux-Arts facade went largely unchanged, its interior represents a full-bore overhaul. The result hits upon a mood suspended between times and styles, a New York throwback glinting with sly subversion.

That is true right from the entry, a limestone composition befitting the grandeur of the street view, the stone flooring inlaid with a bow-tie motif that prods at the formality and lets the Jazz Age clatter in. It is also true in the staircase, grandeur spinning out in a corkscrew sheathed in creamy plaster, unspooling for what feels like an eternity.

The scale of much of the house is heroic, and yet unexpected flourishes lighten the mood. The original ceiling molding in the formal dining room was restored, but a frieze inspired by plant life is entirely new. Ornate, honeyed wood paneling that feels like a Gilded Age holdover is in fact as fresh as the spindly, plaster-cast fixtures.

This mode, traditional but with hints of modernity, flows into the great room, whose intricate molded details suggest amber-clad Haussmannian preservation but which were in fact all created expressly for now. The egg-and-dart detail that wends around the room, for instance, is not a traditional molding motif, but rather an inflation of a much smaller detail—and yet that is precisely what gives it its charm—Paris-by-way-of-Park-Avenue.

The stretched taffy confection that is the en suite bath’s trough-style sink is carved from a sequenced block of unctuous marble that is also used for the floor. The tub follows a similar form, a stone marshmallow big enough to soak inside.

Back in the placid bedroom, a window frames a Mats Theselius armchair, its enigmatic aluminum, beech, and leather construction, and its form, at once traditional and radical, is a metaphor for the home’s governing philosophy: aware of its precedents but not fixed by them.