Architect Lee F. Mindel Renovates a Manhattan Apartment

This article originally appeared in the February 2007 issue of Architectural Digest.

The highly articulate Lee F. Mindel has this to say about the way he and Peter L. Shelton, his longtime collaborator, approach the challenge of an apartment renovation: "The main thing is to identify the problem of a space and to reduce it to its purest essence. People get distracted when they buy an apartment. They go from falling in love to having buyer's remorse so quickly that they can't calm down and ask the most primal questions. What makes a place tick? What about its context is special? Is there some quality of the building that should be celebrated? How does the light work? What is it about the owner that brings specificity to his home? And, finally, what can we, as architects and designers, do to present the clients as the best they can be, given who they are?"

He pauses. "We ask and try to answer all these questions, then we throw them out the window and let intuition take over. Only then can something truly interesting happen."

For a pair of returning clients who had recently acquired a special apartment on Central Park West, Shelton and Mindel began by working down their list. There was a good deal that made this apartment tick. It was in a spirited Arts and Crafts building built by Henry Wilkinson in 1910. The unit Shelton and Mindel's clients chose, on the 12th floor, faced east and south over the park and had a corner view that was "on a scale," Mindel says, "that still made you feel connected to the magnificent city it inhabits." There was excellent light; there was a nice rhythm of windows with a glazed door that opened onto a balcony; the building retained a strong Arts and Crafts flavor.

At the same time, a lot was lacking. There were too many too-small rooms; while they were typical of the early 20th century, they felt claustrophobic in the early 21st. Radiators were exposed. Air-conditioning units were slapped into these precious park-facing windows, which began to feel rather too flimsy for the direction the apartment was heading in—freer and more modern, and as luminous as possible.

When Shelton and Mindel got to the point of letting their intuition float over this potentially beautiful space, it settled on what they saw as the apartment's key feature: its envelope, with its splendid view over the park and the spread of the city. The solution they came up with is simplicity incarnate, though naturally it was complicated to engineer and finesse: They devised a bay system to envelop the envelope.

By constructing this series of bays around the existing windows, the architects solved many problems at once. First they made the windows seem larger than they indeed are. They came up with places to conceal the heating, air-conditioning, sound and electrical systems. And finally, in the remaining available bays, they created open areas for artwork and books and closed ones for storage. All this meant that when the wall came down between the dining area and a guest room that would double as an office, the resulting expanse didn't feel cobbled together but made with deliberateness and care.

When it was time to rebuild the apartment they had taken apart, Shelton and Mindel used traditional, but never fussy, millwork and detailing. They devised a coffered ceiling that seemed appropriate to the building while helping to conceal some odd junctures that resulted when the floor plan was reworked. They used lighting that made architectural sense (no recessed spots within the coffers, for example). And they were particularly clever about resolving the most challenging rooms: The old master bath became a tiny vanity for the wife, while the new bath was relocated in a former closet, and the entrance hall became delineated by a wall that contains storage but stops before the ceiling, so that the light, coffers and moldings remain unbroken through the common areas. "This is very modernist planning," Mindel asserts, "though with historical execution. We weren't trying to be revivalist, but we wanted to respect the building and basic identity of the space."

They were also following the wishes of their clients, a painter and a retired investment banker. "We had a very modern apartment before," says the husband. "And we wanted something one step down from that—an environment that could be a little bohemian even, where pictures could stand on the floor and the atmosphere was more European."

When Shelton and Mindel furnish an apartment, they think about tables and chairs, mirrors and lights, and textiles as further components of the ideas at hand. In the entrance hall, for example, they used color, a vibrant green that alludes to the park just out of view. Elsewhere, they animated the neutral palette with pops of yellow, red, green and blue that derive from elements as disparate as the husband's paintings, midcentury ceramics and the building's own (red) awning.

The specific furniture and objects Shelton and Mindel chose embody the prevailing tension: Arts and Crafts pieces like the English dining table speak to a preoccupation with the handmade that was heightened in 1910, while more machine-made pieces such as the Jean Prouvé console and Visiteur armchair and Poul Henningsen lamp look forward to the design that would come to predominate in the years that followed.

All the furniture has been arranged with an architectural discipline and sense of rhythm, with round shapes bouncing off squares and rectangles and symmetry imparting further rigor. This "stabilization of the interiors" is not about style, a word (and notion) that Mindel finds meaningless unless it is helping to express a set of ideas. Clearly much careful thinking has been brought to bear on a project the wife now considers "a miracle of integrity" and the husband describes as his final New York apartment. "We're lucky," he adds, "that it's such a successful one."