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"View Slideshow\n\nThink the last scene of The Fountainhead: a glamorous female, fearless of heights, rising in a construction elevator, experiencing steel surrounded by nothing but space. In the film it was Patricia Neal; in real life, Manhattan-based interior designer Jennifer Post. \"They put a belt on me that was attached to the building risers so I wouldn't be blown away,\" she recalls. \"I had a hard hat on, too. I spent the whole afternoon up there\"\u2014\"there\" being the 62nd floor of a West Side high-rise, then conspicuously still under construction, in which Post's clients had purchased some 3,200 square feet of unfinished space.\n\n\"The apartment was just a concrete slab, a shell,\" she continues, \"but, whatever the risk, it was worth it, because I got to discover the soul of the space. I came with a pad and sketched.\" The beauty of the project for this designer is that, starting from scratch as she did\u2014literally from a scratch pad\u2014she was able to \"totally define the architecturals.\" And, free to visualize all the various ways of engaging space, she went on to create rooms around perspectives, everywhere angling for maximum light. \"The hero of the project was Central Park,\" she explains. \"I wanted every room to have an unimpeded view of it\u2014for the awe effect. After all, the clients were going to be living up in a cloud; they needed to feel they had that park at their feet.\"\n\nIt was this heady aesthetic that had drawn them to Post in the first place. The wife, Kelly Mack, a vice president at The Sunshine Group (a marketing and sales agent for luxury residential properties), knew a good thing when she saw it: \"Through my work I learned to appreciate really well-thought-out floor plans,\" she says. Her husband, Stephen, who runs an asset-management business, elaborates, \"Kelly and I had been living downtown and loving it, and we were looking for a loft situation; but then the opportunity to be in this building came up and we connected with Jennifer and realized that we could get the loft and the park.\"\n\nFor the entrance hall, Post created a freestanding eight-foot-tall oak architectural element to separate the area from the rest of the far-flung apartment without in the least compromising its sense of unencumberedness. All the ensuing public spaces she made continuous. \"There are no curves in my work,\" she remarks. \"I like the eye never to have to stop, to be drawn straight along.\" The dovetail-white great room, consisting of living room, dining room and media room, is perfectly seamless in its tonality. Picture an entire wall of floor-to-ceiling windows and, instead of solid doors, 11-foot-high aluminum-framed sliding glass panels (they're more like interior windows) that set the dining room off from the media room. There are six more of them throughout the apartment. \"These doors are heroes in this home,\" Post says, adding, \"You can't have too many heroes in a home.\"\n\nThe designer insisted that her architecture and her furniture speak the same language. The living room's 10-foot-long sofas and lean, ebonized low tables (big chunks of wood refined down to their last quarter-inch) and the dining room's high-gloss walnut-stained table are all in fact deployed as architecture and strategically placed.\n\nFor background color, the clients were looking forward to something on the wilder side of white. The furniture and carpets are in soft blues, grays, beiges and olives. Real color was introduced through the art\u2014blazing works by Ross Bleckner, John Chamberlain, Thomas Ruff, Russell Sharon, Johnny Swing, Richard Artschwager. . . .\n\nThe designer prefers her hallways overscale, and the one here is a grandly expansive eight feet wide and 25 feet long, with recessed ankle-height lights to boot. The main artery of the apartment, it was originally conceived to also function as a gallery. But, as Kelly Mack recounts, \"before we got to the point of actually hanging the paintings, we'd come to love the space as it was\u2014free and clear\u2014with that perfect blend of white that Jennifer created, which to this day she won't divulge the secret of. So we decided to keep the hallway pure and put the emphasis where it belongs\u2014on the architecture.\"\n\nPost imposed serenity on the master bedroom and sitting room by lacquering the walls in four exquisitely subtle shades of blue gray. Three walls of floor-to-ceiling windows frame the picture-postcard panorama of the park. The overscale bed was raised for the sake of the view, and low seating built all around the sitting room to make a soft window line. The designer chose chairs that are also low so the clients could, without a stretch, imagine themselves down there on the grass (\"You lose the street,\" she says).\n\n\"When people first walk into the apartment, they see the big picture,\" Kelly Mack observes. \"They see the park, they see the art, they see a clean-lined loft. Then they begin looking at the individual elements\u2014the fabrics, the custom millwork, the stone-work\u2014and they notice that it's all spectacular and that it all blends in. They appreciate how profound the whole thing is\u2014that it has depth as well as surface.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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