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"Michael Leva is always looking for a party. And not an intimate dinner or a sedate cocktail soiree\u2014rather, a pulsating, late-night, dance-till-you-drop affair. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m still a club kid at heart,&amp;quot; says Leva, the creative director of C. Wonder, which manufactures brightly colored women&amp;#039;s apparel and home accessories for its own stores. &amp;quot;In the late 1970s, I was a teenager at Studio 54 and the Mudd Club,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;I love the night\u2014I love blinding lights.&amp;quot;  The Manhattan apartment he moved into more than a year ago\u2014after a stint in Boston, where he was an executive at J. Jill\u2014is perhaps the ideal pad for a man with his passions. During the 1980s and early &amp;#039;90s, Leva designed his own clothing line, which became a favorite with the downtown crowd. Appropriately, the 23-story Jean Nouvel-designed tower where he lives overlooks the trendy, fashion-obsessed Meatpacking district. His 1,200-square-foot one-bedroom apartment has jaw-dropping, full-wall views of the Hudson River and the High Line. But in the evening, his many guests can also ogle the twinkling lights of the cityscape as they lift a well-poured martini and dance, dance, dance. For Leva, it&amp;#039;s the perfect re-entry into the New York scene. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s no table,&amp;quot; he points out, gaily. Although in Boston he lived in a 19th-century townhouse with a formal dining room, he doesn&amp;#039;t seem to miss it a whit. &amp;quot;Who has time for a dinner when there&amp;#039;s so much to do?&amp;quot; he asks.  Leva keeps the furnishings minimal, mixing ultra-contemporary and 18th-century pieces, and his palette is comprised mostly of neutrals. Although C. Wonder is known for its sherbet-bright hues, his personal taste is more low-key; he favors grays and khakis. His restraint complements the pale terrazzo floors and the angled ceilings, which slope down to meet windows divided into shapes that might be drawn from Mondrian paintings. &amp;quot;The city and the sky bring in so much color that you don&amp;#039;t want to compete,&amp;quot; he says.  The pops of color he does use tend to be intense and racy\u2014teal, chartreuse, pink. Perhaps they&amp;#039;re a tribute to his first arrival in New York, at a time when the neon-bright fashions of Fiorucci ruled the day. In his living room sits a large lamp made from a curvy vessel filled with colored water, the kind of receptacle that once dominated the window of a late 19th-century apothecary. Bathed in the light bouncing off the river, the effect is mesmerizing. &amp;quot;I like shiny surfaces,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;It must be all that Mylar in my past.&amp;quot; The space is laid out to maximize the views, but Leva&amp;#039;s bedroom is dominated by a large-scale photograph of the fashion designer&amp;#039;s greatest inspiration: Andy Warhol prot\u00E9g\u00E9e Edie Sedgwick. &amp;quot;She smiles down on me,&amp;quot; he says.  While Leva&amp;#039;s apartment seems designed for a man who sweeps home through the streets at dawn, he does have a mellower refuge. He maintains a weekend home in bucolic Litchfield County, Connecticut. His saltbox there is also awash in neutrals, with furniture in a different mix of periods, from Swedish antiques to midcentury modern. With a fire crackling in the fireplace, the house&amp;#039;s vibe is Gustavian and serene. The dinners he cooks for friends are lit only by candles, as there is no electricity in the dining room. (Leva is the author, with Nancy Parker, of a book on entertaining, Recipes for Parties, which was published in 2010.) He also spends long days puttering around the meticulously maintained cottage garden.  Although Litchfield County is known for its antiques shops, Leva spends much of his time searching for treasures online. He haunts sites such as One Kings Lane, Remodelista, and 1stdibs\u2014he&amp;#039;s a fan of its Saturday Sale. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s absurd to think you have to pay huge amounts for great things,&amp;quot; he says. Take, for example, a pair of David Hicks Lucite side tables in the living room. Leva found them on eBay, unattributed, for a couple hundred dollars each. The apartment has a carefully curated look: Leva found many pieces\u2014such as a Milo Baughman chair he bought in 1996, &amp;quot;for peanuts,&amp;quot; he says\u2014before he had found the right spaces for them, and kept them in storage. &amp;quot;If you love something, you worry about it all later,&amp;quot; he says.  Unlike some designers, Leva isn&amp;#039;t one to constantly shift his treasures around, or to tire of objects he has owned for years. You would have to wrestle him to the floor for his Directoire chair or the small sheepskin rugs he has strategically arrayed around the apartment. (He buys the latter from Samuel Sparrow, the creative director of a Glasgow home furnishings company; Leva e-mails the shades he needs and lets Sparrow pick the perfect fleeces.) &amp;quot;When something is good, it remains good and gives me pleasure every day,&amp;quot; he says.  But don&amp;#039;t call him fussy, despite the way he babies the things he loves. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t take my shoes off or expect people to treat the place like a museum,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;A few nights ago I had a band called Baby Alpaca here, a bunch of wild twentysomethings. It was fabulous. We danced all night.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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