The commission was to design and decorate a townhouse in the Carnegie Hill section of Manhattan that needed to be transformed from a five unit apartment house back into a single home again for a young family. The design was a great challenge and required finding resourceful ways to introduce a new arrangement of rooms around a newly conceived central stair while combining some of the remaining fragments of the original architecture back in. The first decision we made was to move the stair from its traditional location at the perimeter wall so we could make wider rooms. In the new design, what were once stair hall windows became a feature of the principal rooms. Additionally, our concerns about safety, especially in a household with small children, with worries of injuries caused by an open staircase that rose six stories lead us to enclose the stair but in a manner that still permitted the light from a skylight to come deep into the house. Working in conjunction with architect Basil Walter, we devised a continuous screen of metal paneling topped with panes of yellow glass and gold wire mesh that traveled up the entire height of the townhouse. The design of the staircase was influenced by the original architecture of the building; Parisian elevators, and in a stretch of the imagination, the architecture of Sir John Soane, particularly in the use of colored glass and the balusters with medallions. The use of faux grained woodwork helped unify the old and new parts of the house, as much of the original detailing was worthy of notice. The client's collection of English furniture with the addition of some modern decorative art was arranged in this new setting.