<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"View Slideshow\n\nMaybe it was the nine-hole miniature golf course just inside the front door that gave prospective buyers pause. The huge Manhattan apartment on Central Park West, virtually a theme park of Bohemian chic, lingered unsold for many months in a bull market before someone could finally see past the sand traps and fairways to the infrastructure. The good news was that the previous owners had already done the heavy lifting, combining two large apartments into an 8,500-square-foot spread that could handle a family with four children. It didn't matter that no one in the family golfed. More than most Ranch houses anywhere, even in Texas, it sprawled.\n\nAnd what a lovely infrastructure: 100 feet of frontage above the tree line on the park, plus two rear wings that wrap the building's courtyard, offering a view of one of Manhattan's valleys of brick buildings. Still, infrastructure alone does not a home make. The apartment was all potential, but only potential. The owners needed an architect who could invent a completely new reality. They called on Manhattan architects Shelton, Mindel Associates to tame the beast.\n\n\"I have an affinity for this design, all the way back to the Gustavian period. I wanted to have a mix of old and new.\"\n\nRare is the architectural firm that can handle everything from the steel columns to the fabrics, but Shelton, Mindel has specialized in taking houses and apartments seamlessly from concept to stitching\u2014from the gesture and organization of a plan to the disappearing detail. Lee F. Mindel, an expert in contemporary furniture, is conversant with all the major furniture movements of the last 100 years: This high-energy man-about-Manhattan, who always seems to be just off a plane dashing to his next appointment, doesn't simply shop for furniture. He curates apartments.\n\nThree givens drove the design, the first unfortunate. \"The apartment was a wreck and couldn't be salvaged,\" notes Mindel. The second, more fortunate given was the panorama of views and light: The sun never sets on the apartment, with windows facing east, south and west. Light would be a subject of the design.\n\nThe third given emerged after a little prospecting into the family DNA: The wife is of Swedish descent; the family summers each year in Sweden; and the children speak Swedish. Their background suggested that the architects build on the family's roots with a Scandinavian interpretation of Modernism, which is kinder, gentler and warmer than the more dominant Teutonic versions. In egalitarian Sweden, design is unpretentious, spare and touched by a certain modesty. \"The question was how to translate the simplicity and democratic attitude to a big New York apartment,\" says Mindel. That is, how would they keep a trophy apartment elegant and inviting while making it informal and unfancy?\n\nAt the entrance, you don't really step into a foyer but into light, warmed by woods\u2014white oak on the wide-plank floors and oiled walnut on the walls. Scandinavian and Continental architects designed the same kind of flowing space, but Scandinavians gently turned up the visual thermostat with a warmer material palette.\n\nThe design started with the 100-foot-long bank of windows facing Central Park, along which the architects sequenced the living, dining and family rooms. To let light in so that it would bounce from room to room, they created a wide, doorless passage that runs down the full 100 feet: In the flow, the rooms lend and borrow space and light to and from one another. \"We wanted to liberate the window wall to make it one continuous element that connects to the light and frames the views,\" says Peter L. Shelton.\n\nThe clean lines of the uncluttered apartment do not mean the occupants own nothing, just that the architects have expanded each of the walls with functions: Behind every walnut surface is a closet, bath, cabinet or desk. The expanded walls form cubic masses that anchor and shape the surrounding space.\n\nThe great feature of the apartment, its unexpected scale, necessitated strategy. The architects couldn't just divide the floor plans into rooms to make the whole intelligible but had to zone it. The north wing became the master suite; and the south wing, a neighborhood of children's rooms, organized along a little plaza that doubles as a study hall and billiards room. The architects linked both wings with a wide, brightly lit gallery that starts at the entrance and crosses the apartment to the children's wing.\n\nA kitchen lies in the middle, the heart of the home. \"To us, this is the center of our family life,\" says the wife.\n\n\"We can sit at the dining table and look east and west, out to the park or down to the city,\" says the husband.\n\nBut no room or section dominates any other. Each section is of equal importance, and all are easily accessible to one another. \"There's no hierarchy of space that creates major and minor worlds,\" says Mindel. \"The openness between all the spaces allows everybody to use everything. Nothing is off-limits. It's part of Swedish culture to treat things with equal dignity.\"\n\nThe architects bring the same democratic feel into the furniture, none of it imposing. \"We went to Denmark and Sweden and picked many of the pieces,\" says the wife. \"I have an affinity for this design, all the way back to the Gustavian period. I wanted to have a mix of old and new.\"\n\nQuiet in its simple elegance, the living room actually teems in pedigreed pieces, from the Chieftain chair and the bright green dromedary sofa, both by Finn Juhl, to a hyper-simple daybed by Poul Kjaerholm, to a high-back settee by Kaare Klint (its weathered leather makes it look like an old shoe, says Mindel). Despite the pedigree, all the pieces have an understated presence, and none play the haughty aristocrat. Yet in their individuality, the furnishings never disappear into the homogeneity that Scandinavian design suffers in the watered-down forms often seen today. \"The pieces celebrate democracy but break free of any homogeneity,\" says Mindel.\n\nThe architects chose a material palette that recalls the colors of nature in the park outside, and the cooler character of nature in Scandinavia\u2014bark, snow, water and ice. \"The oiled wools, the carpets that look like snowdrifts,\" says Mindel, \"it's an extrapolation of the sensibility that you see in Sweden.\"\n\nFor anyone who has wondered what ever happened to Scandinavian design, or what should have happened, Shelton, Mindel created an apartment that brings the high periods of the 20th century into the 21st. With a delicate balance of history and reinvention, the architects distilled an essence. And because the cultural environment they emulated is grounded in a highly humane ethic, their design translates into livability for an active family.\n\n\"It's a place where the kids come, with their skateboards, and hang,\" says Mindel. \"It's a downtown apartment uptown,\" says the husband."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/mindel-article-042008>