For This New York Townhouse, the Interior Designer Made It "Impossible to Decipher What Was Original and What Was New"

The Upper East Side is one of Manhattan’s most architecturally established residential districts, where late 19th-century townhouses coexist with apartment buildings, museums and the landscape of Central Park. Located just steps from the park, this seven-storey home belongs to that history. Built in 1899, its Beaux-Arts façade is articulated by neoclassical window surrounds, scrolling foliate trims, and decorative panels. Behind it, however, interior designer Rob Johansen has created a home less concerned with returning to an idealized past than with accommodating contemporary family life.

"It was unclear exactly how many lives this townhouse had lived, but it was evident it had lived many, based on the layers we encountered when we first visited," says Johansen. "Despite its magnificent bones, previous renovations did not match my clients’ vision for living there."

Restoring an old house does not necessarily mean preserving the domestic routines for which it was originally designed. Working with architect Nicholas Deramo and his team, Johansen retained the building’s grandeur while reconsidering how its seven floors could function for a family as a modern home.

The clearest example is the primary suite. In the inherited plan, separate bathrooms occupied the front and rear of the floor, leaving the bedroom in the center with little natural light. Rob moved the bathroom inward, returning the windowed rooms to sleeping and bathing. A custom bathtub now sits beside a fireplace and window — a quietly indulgent gesture that required the floor to be reinforced with structural steel to support the marble.

Throughout the house, technically complex interventions make daily life feel intuitive. An existing skylight draws daylight down through the stairwell, while pale walls and floors connect rooms with very different orientations. In the living room, Farrow & Ball’s School House White takes on a creamy, almost spectral quality. "For me, the color has hues of green that evoke a very surreal and haunting feeling," Rob explains, comparing its atmosphere to interiors in Hitchcock’s The Birds and Vertigo.

Rob describes the result as a ‘happy haunting’: rooms that feel familiar and strange at once, without becoming unwelcoming. Historic paneling and Art Deco furniture coexist with contemporary art, curved upholstery, and pieces from the 1960s and 1970s.

Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey informed the formal living room, but the reference ultimately raises a question: how can objects from different periods live comfortably together?

Part of the answer lies in refusing to treat provenance as the only measure of value. Two works by Maria Pergay — the Drape cabinet and Marronnier coffee table, sourced through Demisch Danant — share the living room with a concrete Totem lamp by Rick Owens and the sweeping Landscape Sofa by Nina Edwards Anker. Rather than existing as isolated showpieces, they participate in the room through their materials, silhouettes and everyday use.

"As much as color and texture are important to consider, so is the idea of age," Rob says. "The goal was to make it almost impossible to decipher what was original and what was new." Unlacquered brass is allowed to develop a patina, stone is sandblasted to soften its surface, and timber is selected for the character of its grain. Luxury here is not only visual; it is something touched, lived with, and gradually altered.

This approach becomes especially personal in the kitchen. One of the owners is half Japanese and had long imagined her future children growing up with a traditional Japanese kitchen. Rather than reducing that request to an aesthetic theme, Rob worked with people who could bring deeper knowledge to the project. "I am not an expert on Japanese design, nor have I ever been to Japan, so I had to rely on collaborating with exceptional artisans who had greater knowledge," he says. "In many ways, we studied and experimented with ideas and materials."

That process led to some of the home’s most distinctive decisions. Slow-growth pine from the American Northwest was selected for the cabinetry — paradoxically, a timber prized in Japanese kitchens because its slow development produces an exceptionally fine, tight grain. Hardware was eliminated so that the millwork would read as calm, uninterrupted planes. Automated Gaggenau ovens and a dishwasher activated by knocking on its front preserve that visual quiet.

At the center of the room, a sculptural stone kitchen island designed with Deramo combines Brutalist mass with an angled silhouette that makes it appear almost tilted. Limewashed walls evoke Japanese paper, while another surface is wrapped in handmade Japanese paper. A parchment-and-painted light sculpture by John Wigmore commands one wall; nearby, Fernando Mendes Re chairs are upholstered in wasabi-green leather treated to resemble crumpled paper. The references are cultural and artistic, but their effect is sensory.

Elsewhere, Loro Piana cashmere covers the bedroom walls, an Ayala Serfaty Cloud light hangs overhead and a Studio Drift fixture made from preserved dandelions illuminates the dining room. Yet the house never relies on collectible pieces alone to establish its identity. Bespoke elements respond to the architecture and the family’s routines, while established designs are chosen for their contribution to the wider material language.

This balance prevents the interior from feeling like a gallery. Its identity comes not from fixing every object in place, but from allowing rooms to absorb use. The foyer is conceived as a modular living space rather than a ceremonial entrance. Brass records touch, timber retains its irregularities and furniture can move as the household’s needs change.

For Rob, that evolution is not a disruption of the completed scheme; it is part of the scheme itself. "I want pieces and furniture to move and evolve. There are no rules," he says. "Interior design has to reflect its custodians. Life continues. Families grow. Layers unfold more and more as you add or relocate."

Within an Upper East Side streetscape associated with continuity, the house offers a more flexible understanding of permanence. Its history remains visible, but is neither reconstructed nor placed behind glass. Instead, it provides a framework for new habits and objects drawn from many periods.

As Rob puts it, "Nothing is forever. Change is the only constant." For all its rare materials and significant designs, that may be the most liveable idea in the house.

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