When William Georgis and Ilya Mirgorodsky of the New York City-based firm Georgis & Mirgorodsky set out to design a Park Avenue triplex to house a world-class art collection, it was clear from the outset that nothing about the project would be ordinary. Though the partners have long operated at a varsity level—shaping high-profile luxury residences, museums, and restaurants across the city—creating sufficient space and grandeur for a collection of 20th- and 21st-century masters, including Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman, Pablo Picasso, Gerhard Richter, and Yayoi Kusama, was no small victory.
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To start, Georgis and Mirgorodsky needed to combine two side-by-side duplex apartments and create an additional rooftop structure. Their elegant solution: At the center of the residence is a two-story oculus which was a means of “reconciling all the disparate geometries” of the existing apartments, Georgis explains. “As you probably know,” he continues, “when you’re connecting apartments in New York, it’s very challenging to create a flow that seems sensical.” The rotunda provides a central pillar, which includes the main entrance sandwiched in between the other two floors.
Meanwhile, building the 800-square-foot penthouse, which the team refers to as the “winter garden room,” required a gauntlet of approvals and public hearings, plus extensive sight-line and structural studies. The addition had to look original to the 1924 Georgian-style co-op and remain feather-light. “You have to use different materials so as not to tax the existing structural integrity,” Mirgorodsky notes. Rather than continuing the stone cladding, the team used stucco to mimic the building’s exterior without adding weight.
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A single aesthetic was never the goal for the interiors. Rather, the designers composed a “layered European sensibility,” shaped by the clients’ background. “It has an old-world charm, but there’s also a contemporary nature to some of the interventions,” says Georgis. The overall effect, the designer muses, is one of “children inheriting their grandparents’ apartment, redoing it, and making their presence known.”
Whereas art is often the final layer in a designer’s process, here certain rooms were conceived in direct response to specific works. In the living room, for instance, an oversized Cindy Sherman photograph became the anchor, its scale echoed in an expansive custom sofa by Georgis & Mirgorodsky for Maison Gerard.
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Because the clients entertain frequently, several spaces were purpose-built for gatherings. The Japanesque garden room, with its bar and bath, opens onto a generous terrace for larger parties, while a lower-level library with a jewel box bar provides a more intimate setting. There, peach-hued opalescent glass casts an “apricot–rose glow” that Georgis says “envelops you in that warmth.” Elsewhere, the kitchen offers a deliberate departure with antiqued brass cabinetry and dramatic Breccia Capraia marble backsplash and countertops. Still, says Mirgorodsky, “we brought in an English 19th-century chandelier to tie it back to the rest of the apartment.”
The apartment’s coherence, Georgis notes, comes from a willingness to riff across historical periods rather than adhere to any single one. It’s an approach that resists easy formulas. “There isn’t a rule book for it,” he says. “It’s instinctual—and not straightforward.”
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