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"View Slideshow\n\nThe truth is, interior designers simply aren't like the rest of us. Imagine being on the lookout for your ideal Manhattan apartment: prewar and downtown, bathed in light, lucky in its views. After months of searching, you cannot find your dream, so, in a great show of flexibility, you expand your horizons and agree to look uptown at a building of more recent vintage.\n\nNear Sutton Place a broker shows you a large one-bedroom with great light and views. Most people would stop at the front door when confronted, as Arthur Dunnam was, with the following: a living room inexplicably broken up by a glass-brick wall, completely built out with delaminating black Formica cabinetry and paved with cracked white tiles; a bedroom in the shape of a trapezoid, its centerpiece a carpeted bed platform set at an angle; a maudlin, dark-gray bathroom; and a dated, airless kitchen.\n\n\"I like to design furniture; I have a lot of fun creating unique specialized pieces.\"\n\nDunnam turned to his partner, Roy Cohen, and said, \"This is going to be great!\"\n\nOnly a designer with Dunnam's flair and experience\u201424 years and counting at Jed Johnson Associates\u2014would have beheld this ragged 1970s period piece and identified the treasure waiting to be set free. And how long did it take Dunnam to come up with a solution? \"From the moment I had a copy of the floor plan, about a day, maybe less,\" he says without a trace of false modesty. \"I mean, after all, it is what I do: try to make spaces the best they can possibly be.\"\n\nIn Dunnam's reworking of this apartment, there's a lot to be learned about how to finesse interiors that might, at first glance, present irremediable challenges. Stripping away all the lingering signs of the 1970s seemed obvious, but how to generate an illusion of more height in rooms where the ceilings were eight feet max? Dunnam fell into a lucky extra two inches when he discovered that the floor tiles sat on a thick mud set, but he helped trick the eye by raising door openings, applying a tight plaster crown in a stylized Greek key pattern that creeps up onto the ceiling and laying down a thin cork floor. \"In the bath, I used a ceramic tile I've always seen displayed horizontally\u2014I turned it the other way. I tried to emphasize the vertical in this apartment in every place possible. I think there's a nice interplay between the bold geometry of the travertine-and-ceramic basket-weave mosaic on the floor.\"\n\nWhat about the separate spatial needs of the apartment's two busy inhabitants? Dunnam brings his work home with him, and Cohen is an executive coach and author of the recently published Wall Street Professional's Survival Guide; both wanted home offices, so Dunnam closed off one end of the living room, a hard-to-furnish space that stood on the far side of the foyer. Behind mirrored doors with nearly invisible hinges and pulls there is now enough room for two sets of shelves, two desks and two chairs.\n\nAnother of Dunnam's sleights-of-hand is how he concealed a closet door in the dining area by painting it and hanging photographs half on it and half off (they swing with the door when it is opened). But his craft extends beyond such clever gestures to producing environments that feel tailored, subtle, custom\u2014and specific to the client. \"My goal was to design an apartment that would be richly embellished but not inappropriate in a 1970s building. I wanted it to feel unified, subtle and clearly thought out.\"\n\nDunnam brought very little from his old place: a console in the dining room and a growing collection of contemporary art, most of it in a palette of black and white. The rest of the furniture and rugs he designed because, when working in a limited space, he wanted \"every piece to count.\" He modeled end tables in the living room, for instance, on a Fran\u00E7ois Catroux \u00E9tag\u00E8re he saw in Paris; they provided de facto space for his expanding library. The living room's low table, similarly, has a shelf for more books. \"The walls in here,\" he says of the living room, \"were treated with a Venetian stucco in a pale mocha tone. I wanted a quiet backdrop, because there's a lot of visual interest in furniture. I like to design furniture; I have a lot of fun creating unique specialized pieces.\"\n\nOne indication that an apartment has been clearly thought out, as Dunnam puts it, is the visual connection he established between the rooms. He fitted radiator covers with a handsomely patterned stainless-steel mesh that resurfaces in the kitchen, where it is mounted over mirrored doors, and in the bath, where it frames the mirror that hangs over the basin. Mirrors themselves, used judiciously but strategically on the backsplash in the kitchen and the ceiling of the bath, help draw light into these two windowless rooms. \"Mirroring the ceiling came along late in the process and was a big help in opening up the room.\"\n\nDunnam effected an extended play between light and dark in the apartment by confining himself mostly to neutrals. Describing himself as \"drawn to an array of sculptural furnishings,\" he gave it a special vibrancy by juxtaposing contemporary or midcentury furniture with objects from antiquity. \"Things that seem at first glance not to belong together can end up creating a surprising harmony,\" he says. Rather like a designer, it appears, and his unexpected uptown postwar digs."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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