A new apartment of yester year

At the top of a classic Art Deco building on the Upper East Side is a home designed by Billy Cotton and his exploration of contradictions in a coveted Classic Six building by Emery Roth who was one of the Manhattans definitive early-­20th-century architects.

Cotton pays homage to the classic apartments of previous times, as well as being something entirely his own, a harmonious confluence of opposites: tough and soft, industrial and refined, modern and old-fashioned. Consider the beds with shirred skirts and matching coverlets pulled up over the pillows, a sight unseen in decades. Within the otherwise spare rooms, the effect is almost avant-garde.

He was aided in that by the building itself. The paradox of these pre-war structures is that, as ornate as they can be outside, the rooms within, with their plaster walls, are quite stark, with minimal embellishment, which has given him a certain freedom. It has allowed him to go much grander with decoration. What I love is the whimsy to which the furniture, and particularly the colours have become the flourishes.

Story by Nic-Kaiko Follow him on Instagram kaiko_design