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"View Slideshow\n\nIf New York society has a beacon, it may be the golden, floodlit tower of The Carlyle. Nestled ever so discreetly on 76th Street off Madison Avenue, the hotel, completed in 1929, has long been the preferred watering hole of presidents, movie stars and the Upper East Side elite. It's the place where Bobby Short sings Cole Porter and George Gershwin in muraled splendor at the Caf\u00E9 Carlyle and where, once upon a time, young Caroline and John-John Kennedy frolicked among the Gobelins tapestries in the lobby.\n\n\"You can have breakfast next to Daniel Patrick Moynihan or Tom Ford,\" Los Angeles designer Michael S. Smith, known for his A-list clients, says of The Carlyle. \"It's like a big hotel in a small town, the grande dame of New York.\"\n\nThe hotel's reputation for exquisitely understated service\u2014anyone who is anyone in the midst of a renovation or a divorce stays here\u2014was the main reason Smith's clients, a husband and wife who live mostly on the West Coast, chose The Carlyle for their New York City pied-\u00E0-terre. Best known perhaps as the home of Bemelmans Bar, with its whimsical murals by Madeline creator Ludwig Bemelmans, The Carlyle is also a cooperative that houses the two-bedroom aerie perched above Central Park that Smith\u2014who has seen it all\u2014calls \"a great sweep of an apartment.\"\n\nOccupying two-thirds of a floor high up in a tower, with unimpeded vistas to the Hudson and beyond, the apartment is far removed from the bus-clogged bustle of Madison Avenue. It is also blessed with a rare Manhattan commodity: light. \"My clients wanted something ethereal and pale,\" Smith says, \"an apartment in the clouds, literally.\"\n\nPossessed of an enchanted past\u2014The Carlyle was the New York outpost for both the Truman and Kennedy administrations\u2014the hotel nevertheless has certain limitations common to Manhattan apartments, even grand ones. \"There's this glamorous image of them from the movies,\" remarks the designer. \"But they all have their dark zones and back halls.\"\n\nThis one, with its nine-foot-high ceilings, needed an infusion of \"glimmer and lightness\" to make it feel like a private residence, in the words of New York architect Oscar Shamamian, whose firm, Ferguson Shamamian Rattner, frequently collaborates with Smith. Though no structural alterations were undertaken, the apartment was stripped to its radiator caps. Traditional dark flooring was replaced with light, overscale, bleached-oak parquetry; and tall mahogany doors were added to accentuate the ceiling height.\n\nClassical cornices now complement traditional baseboards, and sterling silver hardware adds a touch of 1930s New York luster that had been lacking. The goal, Smith says, was to \"make the space complex and expansive.\"\n\nThe designer and clients\u2014he is a successful businessman\u2014know each other quite well by now. This is the third residence Smith has designed for the couple; he has also done several corporate offices for the husband. \"They have a deep interest in furniture and architecture,\" he says of his clients. \"They know what they're looking at and make it a very serious pursuit.\"\n\nThe reason for Smith's popularity\u2014his clients have included Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw, Dustin Hoffman and the late Dawn Steel\u2014is clear to the husband. \"Michael's work isn't trite,\" he observes. \"It's always got a little twist in it. He puts things together that don't go naturally.\"\n\nA case in point is the dining alcove adjoining the living room, where a Cuban mahogany table, circa 1820, is paired with parcel-gilt, mahogany and ormolu Russian chairs. In the living room, two de Kooning ink-on-paper works flank an 18th-century padauk-and-brass secretary. \"Back East, people try to make things look like they've been there for 200 years,\" muses the husband, a native New Yorker. \"Out West you're untrammeled. Michael's rooms have a warm patina, which is terrific. But they don't try to impersonate an ancestral home.\"\n\nSmith enjoys collaborating with his clients, even\u2014or perhaps especially\u2014creative, temperamental Hollywood types. \"People get frightened of interiors, of making a mistake,\" he says. \"When it's your house, it's hard to step out of it and be loose. My job is to make things a bit eccentric and interesting. I try to be respectful of the architecture and the taste of the owners, start with that frame-work and then shake things up a bit.\"\n\nWorking in a confined New York space\u2014at least compared with a sprawling California Mediterranean palazzo\u2014Smith uses substantive, important pieces of furniture to provide \"a sense of architecture in shorthand.\" In the living room, for instance, a pair of French Neoclassical marble pillars add drama \"without using up valuable square footage.\"\n\nA smallish guest room is made unexpectedly exotic by the presence of a killer bed\u2014circa 1825 northern Italian with gilt urn finials\u2014enveloped by a lush thicket of tendrils: a wallcovering based on an 18th-century document.\n\nMany pieces were purchased in Europe on buying trips with the clients, including a painting by Peter Lanyon procured at auction in London. \"To be able to play a role in the creative process is very exciting,\" says the husband. \"I'm not a person of leisure, so it adds a lot to the joy of travel. It's tourism with a purpose.\"\n\nSmith's sleight of hand is perhaps most evident in the entrance hall, an appropriate gesture\u2014if you can't make a grand entrance at The Carlyle, where can you? \"I'm obsessed with entrance halls,\" the designer says. \"I love them. They're the most inspiring spaces, because they're architecturally pure. They're not about function. They're about drama.\"\n\nThe entrance to the pied-\u00E0-terre is full of what Smith calls \"trickery.\" A demilune table, for instance, was chosen not only for its elegance but because its shape makes it easy to move around. Sconces are set high, to make the room feel taller, and the 19th-century Venetian mirror helps to expand the space.\n\nHigh above the city, the designer has combined down-to-earth wisdom and practicality with an above-the-clouds fantasy befitting this rare oasis of civility\u2014a place devoid of voice mail, where messages for guests are still left in crisp manila envelopes quietly tucked beneath their doors. \"It's easy to give somebody a look,\" Michael Smith says. \"It's much more difficult to do something elastic and individual. I'm always interested in rooms that are expressive of the people in them. Then I like to take them away a little bit from the expected and give them a little more than what they would have thought to ask for.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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