A Hockney Collage Inspired This Art-Filled Central Park Home, Where a Serpentine Sofa Bows to the View

David Hockney’s photographic collage ‘Sunday Morning’ sees a hotel room pieced together in overlapping prints — an unmade bed, a spread of papers, and the Met Opera’s 1982 season program. No two frames ever show the same perspective; the complete scene assembles countless points of view within a single picture.

Forty years on, that hotel — the Mayflower — is no longer there. But Hockney’s way of seeing has found a new home as the starting point for an apartment renovation on that same New York site. Assembled, in part, around a French family whose life unfolds between Europe and the States, this modern home revels in the grandeur of its setting, perched politely on the edge of Central Park.

Like the artist’s collage, design choices here stitch two previously independent living areas into one single-level residence and a cohesive creative whole. "I was drawn to the way Hockney constructs an image through fragments," explains architect Crina Arghirescu Rogard. "The apartment reveals itself, one lived environment after another."

At 3,000 square feet, the apartment feels more than comfortable in its well-heeled locale. Clad in an old-world Indiana limestone, 15 Central Park West plays the modern heir to New York’s great pre-war residences, pulling on the Neo-Classical and Beaux-Arts traditions that define the city’s most storied buildings.

For the home, now tucked inside that history, Crina understood that practicality mattered as much as poise. "I wanted it to feel sophisticated but very habitable," she says. "You should be able to sit comfortably, read, have a long dinner, move a chair closer to someone."

With a family spread across continents, the apartment rarely hosts the same group twice. So it’s been designed to stretch: "sometimes intimate, sometimes with several generations together."

Just past the threshold, an extraordinary tapestry takes center stage. Its makers, Belgian duo KRJST Studio, spend months embroidering each piece by hand and describe their work as moving between past and future. The piece was made for walls like this one.

It is here that Hockney’s collage begins to take shape. Art is scattered throughout the apartment, each piece seen from a different doorway or angle: a canvas by Mexico City-born Claudia Doring Baez, who reworks images from cinema and art history; neon-lit sculpture by Brooklyn artist Esther Ruiz; and luminous objects by John Junior Kim, crafted from wood, paper, and stone.

“I want those encounters to feel personal and slightly unexpected,” Crina says.

Not every encounter feels unexpected, though. Merging the two separate living spaces into one required a line of consistency to hide the seam — and dissolve any boundary. Crina’s solution was an enfilade — rooms set in a line, each opening into the next — so that one view leads into another.

Underfoot, a moss-green rug does much of the work. It runs from the living room to the library, giving the furniture "a common ground," as Crina puts it. "I like using something soft and tactile to resolve an architectural relationship."

The effect is subtle by design. "You experience the connection," she says, "without necessarily noticing how it has been made."

The living room is where the park takes over. Floor-to-ceiling windows frame the skyline outside, which outranks every canvas on the walls. "The park gives the room an extraordinary horizon," Crina says, and she has been careful not to obstruct it. Almost everything here, quite deliberately, sits low.

At the center is a custom serpentine sofa in rust velvet-mohair, which curves toward the glass — "a generous, continuous gesture," she explains. Its bends make room for different ways of sitting: facing the view, or turned toward one another. "I like furniture that has a sculptural presence and also makes you want to sit down."

The palette takes from both sides of the window. "The rust brings warmth, while the moss green creates a relationship with the landscape outside," Crina says.

Above the sofa hangs Contempt, from Claudia Doring Baez’s series based on Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 film Le Mépris, starring Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli. It was a late addition, though you wouldn’t guess it. "It seems to have been painted for the space."

Beyond its sofa, the apartment turns inward. Here, a wall of timber shelving holds as many bronzes as books: small heads, crouching figures, a horse mid-stride.

For Crina, this is where placement matters most. "It’s where the conversation between art and interior architecture becomes tangible," she says. She considers scale and color, but also "what happens when you encounter a piece from another room."

By the window, a black wrapped chair rises like a sculpture rather than a seat. "A sculptural chair can change a room’s entire rhythm," Crina says — and this one certainly does. Nearby hangs a painting by Gaspard Girard d’Albissin — a pair of pale boots against green — with a paper lamp by John Junior Kim glowing low on a walnut chest.

The kitchen holds the apartment’s centerpiece: a dining table designed with artist Liz Hopkins. Its resin top, a glossy blue-gray, rests on columns of lacquered red, with vintage burl-wood chairs drawn up around it. "I wanted it to have a strong presence," Crina says, "with the lacquer introducing a different quality of light alongside the softer textiles and warmer materials."

It’s built for daily use as much as display. "A sculptural table becomes especially beautiful when people gather around it," she says. It’s also tougher than it looks: "It's very sturdy, resin-finished. I have the same in our studio, and it gets better with time." With young children in the family, she adds, there’s no worry about sharp edges.

The main bedroom is pared back, though far from bare. Low sun falls across pale walls and heavy linen curtains. The palette keeps to white, charcoal, and a soft blue throw, with one exception: a violet disc hung above the bed.

By the window stands a tall black figure, crumpled and wrapped, its outline sharp against the skyline. A cast-metal bench at the foot of the bed is there to answer it, rough and pitted, catching light as the day moves around the room.

Asked to choose the one piece that sums up the project, Crina doesn’t hesitate: the serpentine sofa. "It brings together so much of the project: movement, color, a relationship with the landscape, and the pleasure of gathering," she says.

Her advice for other homes is much the same: carry a color or material from one room to the next, and "pay attention to what you see through a doorway." Even a small apartment, she says, "can offer several connected compositions."

Hockney spent his later years arguing that most people don’t look at things for long enough. This apartment doesn’t make that easy: there's always something more to notice, through the next doorway or out the next window.

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