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"View Slideshow\n\nManhattan-based New Zealander Sandra Nunnerley, fed up with living in a high-rise, had her ear to the ground and was soon being given the lowdown on a \"very desirable town house situation\"two adjacent apartments amounting to a floor-through in an Upper East Side turn-of-the-last-century Carr\u00E8re Hastings mansion were about to go on the market at the same time. Reader, she snapped them up.\n\n\"The starting point, as always, was to get the interior architecture right,\" the designer declares. \"And because I was doing it for myself, it was even harder, because how could I possibly be objective?\" She consulted friends (a professor, an architect, an artist, and an editor, one of whom astounded her by recommending a rotunda), but \"at the end of the day\"\u2014at the end, it goes without saying, of a long progression of days of shaping and sharpening the space\u2014\"it was my design alone.\"\n\nNunnerley was not only the architect and the interior designer, she was also her own contractor\u2014\"I mean, what could be more hands-on?\" She wanted the license to \"change things at a moment's notice,\" to revise and refine as she experienced the sonorousness of the space during different phases of the process\u2014something she insists would have been cost-prohibitive with a professional contractor. On her own, she could allow herself the luxury of spending hours at a time in the yet-to-be-conjoined apartments simply to \"see the light,\" as she says: how it played as it deepened, gilding the floors, and then how the shadows climbed the walls.\n\nThe challenge was that \"these town house floor-throughs have apertures in the front and back only\u2014they're like tunnels.\" She, for her part, was determined to create the sense of a gallery, to which end she demolished the shared wall of the two front rooms to make a single huge square room. Then in the back, in what would become her study, she replaced two small windows with French doors that lent her coffin's-length of balcony the feeling of a life-enhancing terrace. And in what was to become her bedroom, she took down an exterior wall and installed another set of those liberating doors, which also open onto a balcony of their own. Thanks to all this cutting to the bones, the apartment is lucent, airy, and freely flowing.\n\nAs for the decorating, \"I'm not a minimalist by any stretch of the imagination,\" she explains, \"but I do believe that the less you have, the better things look\u2014I don't like to load a room up.\" Here limpid simplicity is all\u2014or rather, limpid simplicity luxuriously accentuated. The big idea behind the big front living/dining room was to \"make it a salon, like in Versailles\u2014there were no dining rooms in the whole of that palace; they would simply set up tables where they wanted them and for how many. Which is what I thought I'd like to do, since we're all living a lot less formally these days.\" The mid-1940s black-lacquer-and-steel Jansen dining table purchased in Paris is versatility itself, a veritable Versailles on wheels, to hear her talk (it can accommodate as many as 12 or, denuded of its leaves, work for as few as two). And speaking of Versailles, no less than a pair of Louis XVI gilded and hand-carved chairs flank the titanic divan, itself fit for a king, being that rare sofa that one can sink into and stay all too sybaritically submerged in. The 1940s Jean-Michel Frank\u2013inspired dining chairs, on the other hand, are positively kinetic\u2014Nunnerley claims that she is constantly moving them around the room and even that they remind her, with their abbreviated skirts, of ballerinas. Naked, black, and incandescent, the high-flying midcentury six-arm Jean Roy\u00E8re metal chandelier is as much sculpture as light fixture.\n\nThe apartment draws a good deal of its virility from the art that Nunnerley has collected. She once worked in that world (for a leading contemporary and Oceanic dealer in Sydney and later for the Marlborough Gallery in New York), and it shows. Richard Serra's painting My Curves Are Not Mad, a stunning testament to strength, scale, and texture, is the room's anchorage, along with Kenneth Noland's brilliant Diamond, a shaped painting in white, yellow, blue, and the apartment's only blade of green. The tutelary spirit of the place remains a puissant Sepik deity or cult figure\u2014a carving used in a New Guinea ritual of some sort. \"I spent a semester on the Sepik River,\" Nunnerley offers, adding, \"Everything I have here relates to something profound in my life.\"\n\nPortrait of Sandra Nunnerley hangs, one dares say solipsistically, above a 19th-century Italian Neoclassical console in the small entrance hall. It's a silhouette contrived by her friend Peter McGough, who, along with his art and life partner, David McDermott, has famously embraced the 19th century, dismissing the modern world as baleful and pedestrian (the duo once proclaimed, \"We've seen the future, and we're not going!\"). \"Peter came with a candle and did it in the quaint Victorian style,\" Nunnerley recounts, going on proprietorily to point out the work's striking biographical elements: \"There's a green stripe that's like a wallpaper, and it has a decorative fabric around it, and that all has to do with my love of interior design; and there's a window and a floor in there, which address my interest in architecture; plus I used to have long blond hair, and he made that into kind of a curtain hanging over a rod. I like it that it doesn't hit you in the face as being my portrait\u2014an awful lot of people don't recognize it as me, which I think is part of the beauty of it.\"\n\nIn the hall just outside her elegant little study, the designer has cleverly placed appropriation artist Richard Pettibone's provocative (it toys with the very concept of originality) 1999 installation piece Brancusi's Dealer. The intricate carving of the work speaks expressively to the antique Ethiopian throne chair that it looks out at. \"I love tribal things,\" Nunnerley declares, indicating also the study's goatskin-topped oval drum table and its Maori hand club made of greenstone (there's another club on the Jansen table in the living/dining room, made of whalebone).\n\nThe placid blue-gray bedroom harbors a circa 1820 Austrian Beidermeier cherrywood chest of drawers; a Louis XVI gu\u00E9ridon topped with a salient Brighton Pavilion mirror; a pair of 1790 Adam mirrors, gilded; and even a Lily, in the form of Erwine and Estelle Laverne's celebrated 1957 acrylic lounge chair. And finally, crows Nunnerley, \"a bit of Kiwiland\"\u2014two sheepskin rugs she picked up on a Christmas visit to her native New Zealand that, more than half a world away, go reverberating on: homey overtones underfoot."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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