Barnes Architects’ NYC Apartment(s) Will Make You Jealous

You know who has good taste in homes? Architects. Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, the couple that designed the new Barnes Foundation building, are featured alongside Renzo Piano and Daniel Libeskind in a Wall Street Journal feature on the homes of the distinguished architects themselves. Williams and Tsien, who’ve been a couple since 1983, share two New York City apartments–a 22nd floor penthouse on Central Park South and a duplex in a ten-story building on the Upper West Side.

When you enter the duplex, you are immediately in the kitchen galley. Next you step up to a platform where you can sit on stools and dine at the counter. Then you walk up two steps to sit in the living area. That final elevation allowed the back of our long sofa to meet the base of the apartment’s original 20-foot-high studio window, which continues up to the second level.

Upstairs, you arrive at a living area with a flat-screen TV and sofas. We wanted a quiet wall for the hall connecting the living area to our bedroom, so we created floor-to-ceiling panels of etched Bendheim glass with mirrors behind them. The mirrors reflect light into the etched glass, producing a greenish, satiny wall surface…

Ok, Ok, we get in. Now back to our regularly scheduled lives. [Wall Street Journal]