Stephen Sills' tiny, elegant New York apartment has been the canvas on which his singular style has been allowed to flourish

By Emily Senior

The American decorator Stephen Sills’ New York apartment isn’t freshly minted. It has in fact been ten years since he completed this latest reinvention. It is probably a space familiar to many US readers, who may have followed its multiple reincarnations since the Nineties when it became, in the words of the designer David Netto, writing about the space in the New York Times in 2014, ‘the apartment that launched a career and inspired the careers of countless others.’ ‘I remember the first time I laid eyes on it in an interior design magazine in 1991. The Proustian velvet ottoman, the twin globes atop painted neoclassical cabinets (paired together on one side of the fireplace, not flanking it); the startlingly oversize Louis XV chenets, the cornice with exaggerated Grecian flutes…It was a game-changer.’ The penthouse, which is on New York’s upper east side - a 1000 square foot space with three rooms - arrived on the scene like a blast of Alpine air, upending all the received wisdom about how a flat of its size and architectural style could be furnished. ‘Roughly every decade I reinvent the apartment, and in every reworking my style gets more edited and clear,’ says Stephen in his sonorous Dallas drawl. ‘I'm always moving stuff and changing things so I have a fresh perspective on it. Then after a decade I want to wipe the slate clean and start over.’

Before this current iteration Stephen describes the decoration as, ‘very 20th century French. I had a collection of Jean Michelle Frank furniture. It was very beautiful and cosy, with the walls in a soft parchment colour. And then after a while, I thought, I've got to get a little less comfortable. What I ended up with is what you’d maybe call a kind of eclectic modernism.’

Despite ostensibly nearing the end of its current cycle the apartment is still a space that feels both elegant and aesthetically challenging. One of those spaces that it takes a while for the rest of the world to catch up with. Textural bone-white walls in a specialist finish hand-mixed by Stephen are topped with a cornice found, ‘at some flea market Downtown, very early in my life. I held on to it and had it cast. It's sort of a Hellenistic design but I'm sure it's probably by some American architect. I loved it because I wanted to extend the height of the ceilings.’

It is a flat of grand contrasts. In the living room, a Robert Rauschenberg sculpture floats above the sofa, flanked by a pair of French chairs by Francis Jourdain and Louis XIII tables. A monochrome Richard Serra work on paper gives a kinetic burst above a Jean-Michel Frank shagreen daybed from the ‘30s. A Man Ray photograph is perched to one side in front of an Italian Directoire mirror on the mantelpiece. These pieces are in dialogue with various Egyptian and Greek antiquities. Much of the art has stayed the same since the beginning. ‘The paintings are really like old friends actually. Signposts from various times in my life.’