How do you adapt a classically-proportioned, historic New York apartment for a family with a modern sensibility? That’s exactly the challenge Heidi Bonesteel and Michele Trout faced when clients tapped them for their first-ever Manhattan project, an apartment in a 1920s-era building by the architect Rosario Candela.
“The bones were amazing,” says Heidi of the space. “So our vision was to keep it really classical, but to give it a nice update.” They with New York-based KinlinRutherfurd to strike the perfect balance of old and new.
This meant preserving much of the structural envelope, while making way for new (modern, clean-lined) furniture, adapting the color palette, and focusing gut renovations on the two spaces that feel most easily dated: The kitchen and baths.
With these as their focal points, Heidi and Michele turned to DLN Partner Waterworks, visiting the brand’s New York showroom as their first stop in project planning. There, they “fell in love” with the Pullman cabinetry and Regulator hardware, which offered just the right modern-meets-industrial style to bridge the apartment’s historic bones and modern new life.
The duo topped the counters in a mix of classic marble and thick butcher block, keeping it from feeling “too precious,” and providing sustenance enough to hold up to the space’s architecture.
While the home’s palette keeps mainly to neutrals, the designers brought in a richness of texture and color with a jewel box of a wet bar, swathed in antique mirrored tile, anchored with forest green cabinets and punctuated with a brass sink and faucet (all from Waterworks). “It’s not big, but it has everything you could want,” says Heidi of the renewed space. The utmost praise for any city home.
