<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"View Slideshow\n\nSome people employ a broker to find their dream apartment, others search the Internet. But Los Angeles\u2013based designer Michael S. Smith discovered his Manhattan pied-\u00E0-terre\u2014a duplex penthouse off Madison Avenue\u2014by looking out a window. He was working nearby and noticed a terrace of elegant proportions that skirted the top floors of a prewar building. \"It had such a beautiful perspective,\" he says of the apartment. \"City views that unfold gently, on four sides, with townhouse rooftops in the foreground and glass towers in the distance.\"\n\nOn a summer afternoon nearly five years later, Smith is admiring the lushness of that terrace from a Jansen sofa in the adjacent living room. He and his partner, HBO executive James Costos, enjoy the contrast of this consummately old-world aerie and their spacious modern house in Holmby Hills. \"L.A. is a dinner-party town,\" Smith says. \"New York is a dinner-reservation town. We love hosting cocktail parties here\u2014you get that crazy wall-to-wall people, Breakfast at Tiffany'svibe between six and eight, and then you're done.\"\n\nWhen the penthouse came on the market, Smith \"leapt at the chance to buy it,\" he says, \"thinking naively that I could just do a little freshening up and move in. But it needed everything. New beams, windows, electrical systems, floors, exterior stucco. And there was way too much \u2018back of the house'\"\u2014mazelike service rooms\u2014\"so it turned into a total gut. We're still fine-tuning the central air. Aren't you a bit hot?\"\n\nNot really. Discomfort is impossible in an atmosphere of such exquisite cool. Smith's decor is formal yet intimate, with a summer-house lightness and a Fragonard palette. An antique Aubusson covers the living room's parquet like a bed of roses. (\"I love its wacky exuberance,\" he says. \"Madame de Pompadour meets Jeff Koons.\") Distressed mirrors, set into the pale woodwork, reflect silvery light. A subtle counterpoint of luster and texture is at work here: matte linens temper the gilt of Jacob fauteuils; the glacial marble of the fireplace is juxtaposed with the molten lacquer of a Chinese low table. The most prominent work of art, a fern painting by Philip Taaffe, is contemporary, but, the designer notes, \"it evokes the botanical drawings of the late 18th century, and I imagined the apartment as a classical pavilion from that period.\" His inspiration was the kind of annex or folly traditionally built on the grounds of a princely estate\u2014a little sanctuary of pleasure and privacy that compensated in charm for what it lacked in grandeur.\n\nA handsome courtier in a redingote wouldn't look out of place here, but Smith, himself a rakishly cherubic blond, is faithful to the Hollywood dress code of designer denim. \"I am a total historicist,\" he says, \"but I grew up around the movie business and I tend to see things cinematically. You adapt a property for the screen the same way you adapt one of bricks and mortar: by breathing new life into an old narrative. That sometimes means taking poetic license, and there's some trickery in these rooms\u2014a little French and a lot faux. But the tension generates a modern energy.\" Smith's sleights of hand include most of the Louis XVI\u2013 and Empire-style furnishings in the master bedroom; the inset mirrors' antiqued Czech glass; and the neo\u2014ultraneo\u2014classical mantels, which were made in China. \"Give me one fabulous authentic piece and I'll clone it,\" the designer says with a grin. \"Which of these twin sofas is the Jansen?\"\n\nWest Coast nonchalance, East Coast intensity, and Continental finesse with a patina of irreverence\u2014the man and his work are of a piece. Discretion being the greater part of finesse, Smith doesn't like to talk about the film stars and financiers that populate his client list. But his approach to projects as diverse as a contemporary beachfront mansion in Malibu, a highly polished Georgian flat in London, and the neoclassical White House, whose private quarters he decorated for President and Mrs. Obama and their family in 2009, is always tailored to the social ecosystem his clients inhabit. \"I'm obsessed with figuring out what is personal and organic to [the people I work for],\" he has said.\n\nObsessed, it becomes apparent, is the designer's favorite word. \"I get obsessed with all kinds of things: fern art, the Empress Josephine, all-natural Slim-Fast, Warhol drawings, Monticello, Paris apartments. When I was outbid on a place in the Palais-Royal, I became obsessed with \u2018Paris in New York.'\" For Smith that notion originates in the Beaux Arts architecture of Ogden Codman and the Art Deco interiors of Elsie de Wolfe, two of his acknowledged influences.\n\nAmong the images on the inspiration board for his own project was a circa-1925 photograph of De Wolfe's famous dining room for publisher Cond\u00E9 Nast's Park Avenue penthouse. Smith decided to take the picture to the venerable wallpaper house Gracie, hoping its artisans could reproduce the hand-painted 18th-century chinoiserie paper. \"Total shock\u2014they had removed it when the apartment was sold in 1943, nearly 70 years ago, and still had some in storage,\" he says.\n\nThere was only enough, Smith recalls them saying, to cover the walls of \"a little room,\" but he had the perfect spot. Part of the apartment's former kitchen is now a ravishing bijou dining room where painted birds peck at ripe fruit on swaying boughs and rare blooms enlace the trellis of a walled garden. Barely enough space exists for the upholstered banquette, the narrow table, and a few slight chairs. But sun streams through a vaulted skylight with nickel trusses, and stars glimmer above.\n\nTrue to its owner's vision, the pied-\u00E0-terre now embodies an ideal of pavilion architecture: artifice paying homage to nature. But it also dramatizes, with poetic economy, the narrative of Smith's career\u2014tradition and modernity paying homage to each other.\n\nClick here to see a slide show of Michael S. Smith's New York City penthouse."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/michael-smith-james-costos-penthouse-apartment-new-york-article>