Real Estate

Designer’s old-meets-new aesthetic on display in tome

Plain Truth: Sills draws the eye to the Apthorp’s ornate original details, like this Jacobean fireplace, by keeping the surrounding decor simple and the palette neutral.

Two years ago, the venerable designer Stephen Sills was tasked with redesigning the courtyard and the public spaces of the classic Apthorp building on the Upper West Side, along with three model apartments. Despite its lofty history and imposing Italian Renaissance Revival facade, Sills quickly realized that this historic grande dame was in need of some serious freshening up.

Mix Master: In a Fifth Avenue living room, strong lines in a Roy Lichtenstein work and the boxy Art Deco coffee table balance the delicate shape of Claude Lalanne bronze “Ginko” chairs.

“It’s like a gorgeous building in Milan or Central Europe,” says Sills of the 105-year-old structure, which went condo in 2008. “But I also wanted to make the apartments very contemporary and put modern furniture in.”

Bold Meets New: Sills created faux-parchment walls for the reading room of this triplex penthouse, resulting in a subtle backdrop for a bold and colorful Joan Jacobs painting.

So Sills decided to do away with traditional dark woods and opted instead for oak panels that were either bleached or painted white. “I said, ‘Let’s just get it very pure,’ ” he recalls.

Ooh La La: The French owner of this Madison Avenue apartment coveted a pared-down, clean look; it was acheived by painting the walls a pale gray and adding multipurpose furniture, like this graphic-print daybed. A bold Vogue print makes a strong statement.

To achieve this look, Sills decided to streamline spaces that lacked a cohesive narrative. This meant reimagining rooms with mixed-up period details — such as Victorian moldings amid NeoClassical mantels or Elizabethan-style beamed ceilings in a room with Regency moldings. He also lowered the volume on the project’s Victorian overtones.

“I find Victorian architecture poetic but there’s also something sad and repressed in it,” says the designer. “People want happiness and lightness in their lives now.”

The Apthorp is one of 14 projects featured in “Stephen Sills: Decoration” (Rizzoli), a lushly photographed book — with a foreword by Karl Lagerfeld — that came out last week.

No longer working with his former partner, James Huniford, the Oklahoma-born Sills — who has decorated for the likes of Tina Turner, Anna Wintour and the Newhouse family — pursues his own vision in these pages: room after room graced by an elegant, distilled design sensibility.

Sills’ signature is what he calls “grayed-out” colors and burnished metallic finishes. Take, for example, a prewar Fifth Avenue apartment he designed for a couple with an impressive modern and contemporary art collection. In the living room, a black-and-gold, 17th-century marquetry cabinet, Claude Lalanne bronze chairs and a rubbed gold-and-silver geometric coffee table are all offset by walls painted a delicate gray. Above the dove-gray sofa, a Roy Lichtenstein painting with an acid-yellow stripe seems to slice through all the soft glimmer of the room. This juxtaposition is another Sills hallmark: an ability to put the old and the important alongside the new and the vibrant.

For Sills, “new” doesn’t mean the white marble floors, downlights and ice-cold conformity that plague so many modern residences — a look he encourages his clients to avoid. Instead, he suggests subtle design details that are nonetheless a bit daring. These might include the 30-foot iroko wood ceilings that soar in a “rock star baronial” home in Aspen, or the scored plaster walls of a Fifth Avenue triplex penthouse that grandly reference the exterior of the Frick Collection, located just across the street. In another Upper East Side home, celadon-painted walls have been covered over with a single layer of tissue paper to create an interesting, watery effect.

Sills will frequently do certain finishes himself, like hand-troweling plaster onto walls or, as in the Upper East Side home of a father of four, applying a Jackson Pollock-style paint treatment on a fireplace mantel — “I had a blast!” he says. Given that many of his clients can afford real Jackson Pollocks, this takes some nerve. “I don’t mind taking chances,” says Sills, who claims that his best work happens when he is, as he puts it, “adrift on his own.”

In one of the brief texts that introduce each of the book’s sections, Sills writes without irony about the idea of the “heroic decorator.” It is, he explains, someone who is not influenced by another decorator. The distinctive, and sometimes mysterious, beauty of these rooms — shot by the renowned interiors photographer François Halard — speaks to the imagination he brings to his work. In the foreword, Lagerfeld calls him “a 100 percent American interior designer in the best sense of the word” and Sills, who was particularly thrilled with that accolade, says that inventiveness is what the best American designers have to offer.

It was also his friend Lagerfeld who put the spotlight on Sills when, years ago, he famously declared that Sills’ shingled chateau in Bedford, NY, was “the chicest house in America.” “I’m so flattered he said it, but everybody in the world still picks that line up,” Sills says. “It’s a little annoying,” he concedes. “But in the end it’s not a bad thing to dog you, is it?”

How to get Sills’ look in six simple steps:

  • Mid-century modern is over. Classic furniture used very sparingly will replace one-note modernity.
  • Metallic finishes are always chic, but they should be burnished or tarnished. Glitz is passé.
  • Forget chenille. Get back to the honesty of fabrics like heavy-gauged linen and boiled wool.
  • I actually love a room with no art. There’s nothing wrong with a beautiful blank wall. It gives your mind a rest.
  • The retro-1970s trend for bars in the entertainment areas of a home is awful. A grog tray stacked with liquor bottles, glasses and ice is far more sophisticated.
  • Small spaces require a disciplined approach — have one concept and stick to it. And keep the place tidy.