Bauders insisted on retaining the original layout of the penthouse room, a challenge considering it had two large windows and the new space had none. Matiyasic and her team resolved the issue by putting the entrance in the spot once occupied by a window and tucking a closet behind the original entrance’s double doors. The area where a window overlooking Central Park had been was left bare. Bauders plans to hire an artist to replicate the view.
Matiyasic furnished the room in an eclectic style consistent with the rest of the home’s decor. The color palette was dictated by a 1960s Oushak rug and new pair of Taylor King slipper chairs in a chinoiserie-inspired orchard-themed pattern on orange velvet. She rounded out the seating group with a Highland House sofa ordered in a teal damask-patterned cut velvet, a 1970s Isabelle Faure coffee table with a sculptural brass base, vintage swivel club chairs reupholstered in gold velvet, and a new solid marble side table. The mix of old and new, together with vibrantly colored and patterned upholstery, injected vitality into a space that Matiyasic admits could’ve become stuffy.
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“(David) didn’t want it to feel new,” she adds. “He wanted it to feel collected.”
Bauders uses the room as a library where he displays acquisitions such as a painting by Cuban artist Wifredo Lam, two watercolors by the late British prime minister Winston Churchill, and the skeleton of an extinct marine reptile called a mosasaurus.
“With the skeleton and other artifacts that I’m going to be putting in there,” he says, “it’s like a little private museum.”