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"View Slideshow\n\nRemember Michael J. Fox, the kid who with a glance could summon up all the confusions, all the idealism, and all the naughtiness of youth? Remember him as the suave, irritating Alex Keaton on Family Ties or as Marty McFly, eagerly tinkering with the Flux Capacitor in Back to the Future?\n\nThe future has arrived, and these days Fox is involved in the ultimate adult activity, raising his own kids. At work he\u2019s a deputy mayor on the sexy, sophisticated television series Spin City.\n\nThis unlikely paterfamilias, with his wife, actress Tracy Pollan, and their three children, has also graduated to a family apartment on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan\u2014in a neighborhood near playgrounds and preschools. \u201CI\u2019m grown up now, and it was time to have a grown-up place,\u201D Fox says.\n\nWhen it comes to real estate, though, growing up is hard to do. In the years since Fox and Pollan were boyfriend and girlfriend on Family Ties and appeared together in the 1988 film Bright Lights, Big City, they have lived in a series of dream homes that fell short as realities\u2014a movie-star house in Bel Air, an apartment on the Upper West Side, and a spread called Lottery Hill Farm in Vermont. \u201CThe upside and the downside to being young is that you can play out some of your fantasies,\u201D Fox explains. \u201CBut when you have kids, you look at things in a different way. Now we\u2019re being practical. We bought a Suburban to drive around in, and we did this apartment. This place is about me and Tracy and the three units.\u201D\n\nA string of sun-splashed rooms filled with pale woods and paler fabric, the apartment looks out on Central Park in a residential neighborhood. \u201CI wanted an oasis,\u201D says Pollan, who grew up a few blocks away on Park Avenue. \u201CI kept thinking serene, calm, quiet.\u201D At first she was attracted to Japanese design. \u201CIn a Zen garden you might feel peaceful, but you don\u2019t feel at home,\u201D she says. \u201CWe wanted both.\u201D By the time she and Fox hired New York designer Marc Charbonnet, they had settled on the mood they\u2019d seen in a photograph of a 19th-century Swedish salon, a room filled with white-painted furniture surrounding a red pouf. \u201CI liked the colors, the blues and yellows, and I loved the lightness of it,\u201D Pollan recalls.\n\n\u201CAt the same time, I wanted it to look like a Fifth Avenue apartment,\u201D Charbonnet adds. \u201CThere had to be a substance to it.\u201D Using the photograph as a starting point, the designer, who was raised in New Orleans and started his New York firm, MECA, six years ago, created whitewashed, light-washed rooms anchored by glowing Biedermeier furniture. With its four windows and gauzy draperies, the living room was so light and airy that \u201Cit looked as if it was going to float away,\u201D Charbonnet says. He added a red velvet ottoman that echoes the pouf in the Swedish photograph and draws the eye to the rich colors of the Kerman rug\u2014part of Fox and Pollan\u2019s collection of antique Oriental carpets.\n\nOnce Pollan and Charbonnet had decided on a style, everything fell into place. \u201CI took them to Sotheby\u2019s and they said, \u2018Yes, yes,\u2019 \u201D the designer remembers. \u201CI took them to Christie\u2019s and they said, \u2018Yes, yes.\u2019 I showed them photographs of things I found at auction houses in New Orleans and they said, \u2018Yes, yes.\u2019 \u201D Charbonnet gravitated to Biedermeier because \u201Cit has a young feel to it,\u201D he says. \u201CThey didn\u2019t want anything dark or heavy.\u201D He designed tailored lampshades and put a Biedermeier daybed back-to-back with the sofa at the center of the room. \u201CIt\u2019s important that a room be comfortable if there are two people in it or if there are 20 people in it,\u201D he says. \u201CI like things to be comfortable\u2014they can\u2019t just be pretty. I like fabrics that grow old gracefully. Velvet, for instance. You can wear it and use it and your collie can sit on it and it still looks fine\u2014chintz doesn\u2019t.\u201D\n\nCharbonnet, who spent three years working at the firm of architect Peter Marino and a year with antiques dealer John Rosselli in New York, says part of his job is to help his clients learn what they like. \u201CI don\u2019t think it\u2019s proper to impose my style. I work with people to develop the taste and style they already have. When they\u2019re finished, it isn\u2019t what they would have done, it\u2019s what they could have done.\u201D\n\nOne of Fox\u2019s favorite parts of the decorating process has been learning. \u201CI was the odd duck,\u201D he says of his childhood in a military family in Canada. \u201CI had an aesthetic sense that was unusual. I remember once we had an orange carpet and a turquoise sofa, and I was the only one who thought there was something wrong with that.\u201D Since he left home for Hollywood as a teenager, Fox\u2019s taste has continued to develop. \u201CI grew up thinking that old was not beautiful,\u201D he says. \u201CIf you wanted the best of something, it was new.\u201D When he met Pollan, he was amazed that her New York apartment was in an old building. Pollan, he says, helped him to \u201Cget hold of the beauty of old things.\u201D He began to see the elegance of moldings, the charm of old-fashioned architecture, the glow of antique woods.\n\n\u201CI\u2019m still so na\u00EFve about all this,\u201D Fox says. \u201COne day I realized, Oh, we\u2019re doing a Biedermeier thing! Cool! I love Biedermeier. You look out the living room windows and you see the tops of the trees. Wow! This is like being in a tree house,\u201D says the actor. It\u2019s a tree house where a beige-velvet-cushioned daybed faces an elaborate Biedermeier bureau-secretary topped with an alabaster lamp and antique Swedish mirrors. Where a 19th-century marble mantel holds a 19th-century French bronze clock and porcelain vases under a gold-framed mirror that reflects Baltic marquetry stools, white-painted Charles X chairs, an Italian commode, and a 19th-century dolphin lamp.\n\nNext door in the dining room, where Charles X chairs join a round mahogany table, Charbonnet set a Charles X commode, two Biedermeier cabinets, and two 18th-century demilune cabinets beneath a Charles X chandelier. \u201CThe furniture gives the room weight without making it heavy or dowdy,\u201D he says. Near the entrance hall, which is furnished with a Biedermeier settee and a 19th-century Russian pedestal table, the designer created a cozy library, where a huge television screen is housed along with the family\u2019s collection of books. And he designed a hidden door from the library to a new bath that also serves the room behind it\u2014the bedroom where Fox and Pollan\u2019s eight-year-old son, Sam, sleeps amid shelves of toys and books in an English Arts and Crafts bed. (The nursery for the couple\u2019s two-year-old twin girls, Aquinnah and Schuyler, is next door.) \u201CIt\u2019s a wonderful English oak bed that will always be his,\u201D Charbonnet says. \u201CI wanted the rooms to be durable and useful. Sam is eight now, but a 17-year-old would be happy in that room. I\u2019d be happy in that room,\u201D he adds with a laugh.\n\nThe master suite, which Charbonnet converted from two small bedrooms and two small baths with help from architect David McAlpine, sits at the opposite end of the apartment, down a long hall. The room looks out over treelined streets. \u201CIt\u2019s like a little Parisian neighborhood,\u201D Fox says. \u201COne of the things I love about New York is the sense of community.\u201D Fox and Pollan asked Charbonnet for a bedroom that could be in the Crillon or the Plaza Ath\u00E9n\u00E9e in Paris. \u201CThey wanted things to be as perfect as they are in a great hotel,\u201D Charbonnet says. \u201CI tried to create a sleepy elegance.\u201D A bubble of pale light with white furniture, an antique French screen, and a duchesse, the bedroom is dominated by a sleigh bed upholstered in blue Swedish fabric. \u201CFalling asleep in that bed is like sleeping on a cloud,\u201D Charbonnet says.\n\nFor Pollan and Fox, it\u2019s definitely cloud nine: \u201CWe know each other\u2019s taste and we know what we like,\u201D Pollan says. \u201CWe sat down together and asked, \u2018What is our fantasy?\u2019 This is it.\u201D\n\nClick here to view the slide show of Michael J. Fox and Tracy Pollan&amp;#39;s airy Upper East Side home from our October 1997 issue.\n\nAnd click here to see the same apartment redesigned by Gomez &amp;amp; Assoc. and featured in our December 2012 issue."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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