Elegant Living at One Dalton

In the living room, designer William Schroeder and architect Juan Guillermo Uribe Rubio nestled a Chesneys limestone mantel within custom de Gournay wallpaper panels and incorporated andirons that belonged to Karl Lagerfeld. The artwork is by Henri Lebasque.

The team removed a large closet from the den to create a wood-paneled niche for a sleeper sofa. Schroeder based the design of that couch on one in Coco Chanel’s Paris apartment. The artworks above and in the hall are by the client’s late mother.

Schroeder framed the den’s city views with curtains in a red-and-gold Scalamandré damask. Between the swathes of fabric sit a Louis XVI bureau plat and a Second Empire chair. The designer likens the custom leather-and-reeded-walnut cubes, which roll on invisible casters, to “fancy TV trays.” 

When the designers discovered an additional foot of height above the hall’s original ceiling, they created a gold-leafed vault. It crowns a dramatic space lacquered in an oxblood hue from Fine Paints of Europe.

An Edo-period Japanese screen adorns the wall above the living room’s Christian Liaigre sofa.

The 1930s T.H. Robsjohn-Gibbings mirror in a guest bath also hails from the collection of Karl Lagerfeld, which was auctioned while Schroeder was designing this home.

One Dalton’s architecture, by former I.M. Pei partner Henry Cobb, led to the primary bath’s custom Ann Sacks marble floor. “The building is a triangle with curved edges,” says Uribe Rubio. “That radial pattern is seen throughout the home.”

A Phillip Jeffries gold-leaf-on-silk wallcovering inspired the primary suite’s decor. Its Japanese effect echoes the living room Edo screen. A David DeSantis chair sits under a Matisse-style nude by the homeowner’s mother.

Luxury Interior Design with Creative Freedom in a Boston High-Rise

If there’s a trio of most-precious gifts a homeowner can bestow upon a designer, they may be these: a clean slate, creative freedom, and—perhaps most cherished of all—an open mind. Rare though this triumvirate is, it was just the blessing that interior designer William Schroeder and architect Juan Guillermo Uribe Rubio received from the owner of this three-bedroom apartment on the thirty-ninth floor of Boston’s One Dalton.

The client, who was relocating from the suburbs, brought to the project a collection of fine art, including paintings by her late mother, and a love of sailing. But she didn’t have a particular course that she wanted the designers to chart. “She said, ‘Well, I’d just love for you to do this as you see fit,’ ” Schroeder recalls. 

And so, creative freedom in hand, he and Uribe Rubio turned to a clean slate. That materialized courtesy of the building’s developers, who delivered the unit as something of a white box. As for the open mind, that became apparent as the homeowner said yes to the evermore irresistibly lovely finds the designers proposed to incorporate into their luxe scheme: gold- and silver-leafed vaulted and tray ceilings in the hall and living area, marble floors laid in a radiating pattern in the primary bath, a carved limestone fireplace in the sitting area, custom hand-painted de Gournay wallpapers, and antiques acquired from the private collections of fashion icons Karl Lagerfeld and Hubert de Givenchy. 

French-Inspired Interiors with Timeless Architectural Elegance

If that all sounds rather French, well, it is. And that’s very much by design. Allowed to indulge in decorating fantasies he’d been harboring for years, Schroeder found himself dreaming of Paris’s art deco-influenced interwar period, when celebrated designers like Jean-Michel Frank defined the height of chic. “They were the tastemakers and patrons of the arts who decorated the salons of the early twentieth century,” says Schroeder. 

For his part, Uribe Rubio notes that he and Schroeder both embraced the apartment’s million-dollar city views even as they designed the space with plenty “that the eye would see in the foreground, middle ground, and background, to create interest.” They also devised a classical European sense of symmetry and enclosure, which they’d found lacking in the open, contemporary plan.

The richly layered decor that now adorns this home owes as much to the designers’ talent as it does to their partnership. “William and I work beautifully because we work hand in hand,” explains Uribe Rubio. That aesthetic esprit de corps certainly seems to please the homeowner: “She keeps things exactly as we left them,” concludes Schroeder with a smile, “down to the inch.”

Project Team
Architecture: Pauli & Uribe Architects
Interior design: W.R. Schroeder Interiors
Builder: Cafco

Styled by Sean William Donovan