A Soane Britain floral masks the asymmetrical architecture of the guest bedroom, where a Dunes and Duchess bed is topped with a Matouk quilt. A lumbar pillow boasts a vintage Sister Parish fabric. The bedside lamps are Visual Comfort & Co.
How An Elegant Manhattan Pied-À-Terre Plays With Pattern
Interior designers are rarely just creatives. More often, they’re project managers and lighting specialists, mathematicians and spatial engineers. But sometimes, they’re also therapists, talking clients through difficult design decisions, or judges, adjudicating arguments between parties with conflicting styles. Now, Kerri Pilchik can add illusionist to that list.
When a client approached the designer to enliven her family’s pied-à-terre, two combined apartments in a historic Art Deco–era building in the Turtle Bay neighborhood of Manhattan, there was just one condition: Though the residence had been stripped of its original character and remade into a bland white box, these homeowners were adamant about avoiding construction. Any changes to the home would have to be cosmetic, which would have been a fairly straightforward request if not for the inordinate number of air-conditioning ducts that marred the interiors.
“You would not believe the number of soffits in this apartment,” says Pilchik, who is known for balancing her exuberant use of color and pattern with a clean, calm aesthetic. The challenge lay in making those soffits disappear without any structural intervention. “Since we couldn’t rely on architectural enhancements, we had to incorporate visual trickery to fool the eye.” Like the optical illusions marveled over by children, the resulting perception play reveals itself only after you’ve been let in on the trick.
The ruse begins in the entry, where Pilchik cleverly employed a vertical-striped wallpaper to amplify the space’s 10-foot ceiling height and soften an overhead soffit’s visible lines. The designer also hired a decorative painter to embellish the existing floors with a stained trellis-style parquet pattern, delineating the area from the adjoining living room and kitchen and establishing a counterbalance that discreetly reorients a guest’s field of vision. As troubleshooting as those choices were, the combined effect creates a sense of approachable grandeur that also lays the groundwork for more daring feats of visual intrigue.
In the living room, that meant leaning into the cornflower-blue hue that Pilchik’s client had chosen for the walls and carrying it into other interior elements, creating a uniform backdrop that allows wandering glances to gloss over the less-than-desirable architecture. “We didn’t want your eye to rest on any of those flaws,” says Pilchik of the cacophony of soffits that stretches across the ceiling. “I used similar colors to create continuous planes.” In turn, she covered the sofa in a basket-woven cotton and commissioned custom cornices to frame the trimless windows, all in tonal hues. From there, the designer drew out a symphony of harmonizing prints to mesh with the vibrant colors and patterns on the existing rug and crowned the seating area with a diverting geometric triptych by Jason Trotter.
Sleek elements, like a brass light fixture from Artemest and table by Huston & Company, infuse traditional design with modern energy. The Iksel mural emulates the Lisa Fine Textiles fabric covering the seats of Redford House chairs.
Jason Trotter art hangs over an O. Henry House sofa clad in a Susan Deliss fabric in the living room. Lamps from the Brimfield Antique Flea Markets complement walls of Benjamin Moore’s Wild Blue Yonder. A Bungalow Classic coffee table adds texture.
A Robert Kime fabric on the seat of a Chelsea Textiles chair and the undulating border of a Vaughan mirror echo the swirling pattern within the entry’s Schumacher wallpaper. The console is Chaddock and the floors were painted by Shelly Denning.
To coordinate with the traditional blue-and-white scheme that appears throughout the home, designer Kerri Pilchik installed a wallpaper by Lewis & Wood in the kitchen. New brass hardware by Rejuvenation and a cotton flat weave embellish the space.
Pilchik carved out a cozy breakfast nook anchored by a tulip table and woven chairs. The banquette is dressed in a Penny Morrison fabric while the window shade features a Fermoie textile. A Visual Comfort & Co. fixture crowns the scene.
Sleek elements, like a brass light fixture from Artemest and table by Huston & Company, infuse traditional design with modern energy. The Iksel mural emulates the Lisa Fine Textiles fabric covering the seats of Redford House chairs.
In the dining room, NYC Fine Finishes deployed Farrow & Ball’s Bancha lacquering to turn a hidden bar into a glamorous jewel box. The addition of brass rails befits the 1930s building’s architectural history. A vintage chandelier offers illumination.
A Soane Britain floral masks the asymmetrical architecture of the guest bedroom, where a Dunes and Duchess bed is topped with a Matouk quilt. A lumbar pillow boasts a vintage Sister Parish fabric. The bedside lamps are Visual Comfort & Co.
The dining room displays yet another sleight of hand that comes courtesy of an elegant mural plastered upon the walls. The nautical scene—meant to evoke the East River centuries ago with its plentiful sailboats anchored in the water—seems to expand limitlessly into the horizon, inviting viewers to immerse themselves in the panorama, while painted trees create a natural barrier that keeps sight lines in check. A jewel-box bar area swathed in olive-green lacquer helps to embolden those rendered evergreens.
But perhaps Pilchik’s wiliest moves came in the sleeping quarters, where she went all in on maximalism. In the guest bedroom, the riotous red florals of a wallcovering extend to the Roman shades, creating a cocooning effect that also manages to erase any asymmetries. “That space has the most soffits of any room in the apartment and the window isn’t centered, so I knew I wanted to do an allover pattern so that it would feel continuous,” the designer says.
With the largest modes of misdirection in place, Pilchik finally layered a collection of vintage furnishings and accessories—some already owned by her clients, others newly sourced from antiques shops—and bespoke pieces that look like they’re from another era to warm up the home and restore a sense of history and personality that was previously lacking. A diminutive beaded-glass chandelier hanging above the dining room bar, a bone-inlaid cane cocktail table in the living room and a weathered Swedish desk in the guest bedroom—everything works in concert to subtly land Pilchik’s aesthetic smoke screen faster than you can say “abracadabra.”
Pilchik carved out a cozy breakfast nook anchored by a tulip table and woven chairs. The banquette is dressed in a Penny Morrison fabric while the window shade features a Fermoie textile. A Visual Comfort & Co. fixture crowns the scene.