In 2019, when the designer Michael Thomas Murphy first visited the grand one-bedroom on the parlor floor at 36 East 69th Street, it looked like a suite for a president who didn’t exist. There were busts of Jefferson and Jackson, winged eagles and Ionic columns, and below it all, a blue-and-red carpet with yellow stars. “She had a lot of American flag memorabilia.” The furniture was puffed and velvet, and the walls were painted a patriotic red. Toning them down would eventually require “like 30 coats of white paint,” Murphy remembered. “And it kept going pink.”
The one-bedroom with a library, three Juliet balconies over 69th Street, three small terraces, and a private elevator had been designed to the last square inch by Francine Coffey, a fashion director at Singer who had worked as a buyer for Yves Saint Laurent and the Duchess of Windsor. The designer had told Architectural Digest that her inspiration for her apartment came when she was decorating a client’s home with Roman roundels and wondered what the hell she was doing: “This is America. Presidents are men I admire deeply. Why not live with them instead of the Caesars?” She called her vision “nouveau Federal,” a style somewhere between Oval Office and elite private men’s club. She walled the bedroom in heavy, Black Watch tartan, added moldings and a gas fireplace in deep mahogany, and stained the floors. In what might, in a past life, have been a useless hallway, she created a mahogany walk-in closet that wouldn’t have looked out of place at Brooks Brothers. The kitchen was black — even the ceiling. And a back bedroom became a library, whose shelves she capped with gilded lettering, spelling out Latin translations of her grandmother’s axioms: “Never trust a handsome man or an ugly woman” and “Money and power don’t change men, they just unmask them.”
Coffey’s “nouveau Federal” style wasn’t too much of a stretch for the six-story mansion. Like the neoclassical buildings in Washington that house government workers, 36 East 69th Street steals from Greek and Roman architecture. Columns around the entryway are most likely from a 1923 makeover of the façade by Carrère and Hastings, the architects responsible for the New York Public Library, who pushed a showier, Beaux-Arts style that translated those simple, classical elements through a French taste for luxury and froth. Their renovation was probably designed to please the family of Theodore Pratt, a banker and a founder of Standard Oil, who left when the Pratts divorced in 1930. The family home eventually sold to the Binger family, who stayed through the 1960s. The six-story building was then divided into 12 smallish apartments and went co-op in 1984. On the grandest parlor floor, whose 11-foot ceilings were designed to wow guests, Coffey had combined two units: A studio with French doors that opened onto 69th Street turned into her living room, and a former one-bedroom in the back had its living area transformed into her tartan-swathed bedroom. The renovation took walls down to the studs and built them up again with more moldings, columns, and finery; on the living-room ceiling, Coffey had a craftsman create a period-appropriate plasterwork seal. The hallway that once divided the units was no longer necessary, so the elevator became private.
“There’s nothing else like it,” says Murphy, who as a designer has seen his share of dated Upper East Side interiors (crimes, in his opinion: “bad brown marble,” “glass stairways”). His vision for this unit was “Haussmann style, French classic,” he said. “Like it would have been originally” if Carrère and Hastings’s Beaux-Arts vision had continued indoors. Murphy and his ex-boyfriend peeled off the tartan and sanded down and refinished Coffey’s dark floors to what they might once have been: a light ocher, with a simple, pretty herringbone pattern. They updated and lightened the kitchen and bathrooms but couldn’t bear to update the library, with their mahogany built-ins inscribed with Coffey’s grandmother’s sayings. “That was just too good to touch.”
The designer Francine Coffey had embellished an existing fireplace in the living room. When Michael Thomas Murphy arrived in 2019, the mantel was painted black and edged in gold, and set against blood-red walls.
Murphy and his boyfriend changed much of the apartment, but didn’t touch Coffey’s library — with mahogany built-ins, capped with Latin translations of her grandmother’s axioms.
They renovated the kitchen, brightening a room that was once entirely black — even the ceilings. The elevator, visible in the background, fits one person and opens directly into the unit.
The bedroom had once been wallpapered in severe Black Watch tartan and had the feel of a hunting lodge or a men’s club. “It still feels masculine, but it’s definitely much more contemporary and light,” said Murphy.
The bedroom is large — it was once the living area for a one-bedroom apartment, and it has a small terrace that looks into a garden.
The owners also kept Coffey’s walk-in closet. She used mahogany for all her cabinetry and shelving.
The unit was originally two apartments — a studio and a one-bedroom — and Coffey kept both bathrooms.
The designer Francine Coffey had embellished an existing fireplace in the living room. When Michael Thomas Murphy arrived in 2019, the mantel was painted black and edged in gold, and set against blood-red walls.
Murphy and his boyfriend changed much of the apartment, but didn’t touch Coffey’s library — with mahogany built-ins, capped with Latin translations of her grandmother’s axioms.
They renovated the kitchen, brightening a room that was once entirely black — even the ceilings. The elevator, visible in the background, fits one person and opens directly into the unit.
The bedroom had once been wallpapered in severe Black Watch tartan and had the feel of a hunting lodge or a men’s club. “It still feels masculine, but it’s definitely much more contemporary and light,” said Murphy.
The bedroom is large — it was once the living area for a one-bedroom apartment, and it has a small terrace that looks into a garden.
The owners also kept Coffey’s walk-in closet. She used mahogany for all her cabinetry and shelving.
The unit was originally two apartments — a studio and a one-bedroom — and Coffey kept both bathrooms.
