---"You can see clearly how decoration affects people and their response to the fact that they're alive," he said, speaking of the interior of St. Mary's, the fist church built on a towering steel frame. "When you walk into that room - it's 80 ft. high from floor to ceiling, the nave is 160 ft. long - the physical beautify of the decoration helps people encounter that space within their lives where I, as a Christian, would say God is."
CITY SOUL Above, the rectory of St. Mary's on West 47th Street. Right, Father Gerth in its freshly redecorated turn-of-the-century triple parlor.
 
---Mr. Jayne's office, including the project's manager, Leigh Taylor, had repeated discussions, not about the usual decorating transfigurations-turning new money into old - but on walking the line between "seemly and unseemly," the decorator said.
--- "We wanted it to be handsome," Mr. Jayne said. "We wanted it to be modern. We wanted it to be respectful of the past. But we knew it couldn't look like a papal prince live here either."
--- Mr. Jayne's previously ecclesiastical experience included decorating a private chapel and a mausoleum, but nothing on a rector's shoestring. With the exception of the budget - at $35,000, there was none, in the decorator's usual terms - Father Gerth, with his high-ceilinged, 11-room home, was not an untypical client for Mr. Jayne.
 

RICH IN SPIRIT Mr. Jayne introduced modern touches to the rectory's traditional rooms, stretching the style quotient without straining the budget: a pink mirror in the parlor, above; a laser-printed wall paper, top right. Stenciling and silks, right, freshen Victorian wood.
 
--"The client likes to entertain," the decorator said of the rector. "The rooms are the same scale as the Dakota. The uniqueness of the project was, how much can we eke out? How great could we make it all look for what we had?"
---Mr. Jayne and his office worked pro bono, donating both services and stuffs returned, rejected or recycled from other jobs. He also solicited discounts from his tradesmen and gifts from suppliers like Pollack, a fabric company.
---Mr. Jayne's domestic partner, Rick Ellis, a food stylist and culinary historian who volunteered his time was the project's on-site manager and resident "stylist-handyman," as Father Gerth described him. Because of the basic budget Mr. Jayne's job on the St. Mary's rectory is a kind of Decorating 101 at work. The church has its mysteries; decoration does, too. Decorators have their own set of scriptures.
---Mr. Jayne picked upholstery fabrics first, choosing colors and textures that were varied, likable, lively and fresh, using them to coordinate the several generations of unrelated furniture in the house. Spinsterish Victorian eccentricities like carved corner chairs received sumptuous woven silks. Large rectilinear pieces, like a sofa, were covered in textiles with surface relief, like chenille. Curved armchairs got flat fabrics with a sheen, to accentuate their shapes. Paint colors were the next priority.
---"We worked hard to make beautiful paint colors," Mr. Jayne said. "It was a way of maximizing our budget. You have to paint and it doesn't cost any more to have an interesting color as a boring color. You want color to be beautiful, not unusual."
---The decorator used a yellow beige in the hallways and stair hall, and a yellow gray in two of the parlor rooms in the rectory's impressive turn-of-the-century triple parlor. A bird's-egg-blue parlor separates them, embellished with Chuck Hettinger wall stencils of Gothic crosses, a motif
taken from the bronze candle-burning chandelier, strung with crosses, which Mr. Jayne donated to the rectory.
---"The only thing he ever questioned was the size of that chandelier," Mr. Jayne said of Father Gerth.

"This gigantic chandelier arrived. He called my office and spoke to Leigh - he didn't want to speak to me - and said, That's not staying is it?' I left him a voice mail: 'It will be fine; more will be revealed.'"
---Mr. Jayne decided to use a large chunk of his budget on his "Park Avenue painters," as Father Gerth called Otto Interiors.
---"Because of the budget, this project was mostly about composition and arrangement," Mr. Jayne said, "and if you have a bad surface as a foil, it looks bad." He put two-thirds of the rectory's furnishings in storage, replacing them with more serviceable and decoratively cohesive pieces, like a white cotton-linen suite of Pottery Barn sofa and chairs for the back parlor, discarded by a client.
---"It had to be calm, plain, a really easy room," Mr. Jayne said " A place for Father Gerth to be pastoral, and talk to his parishioners, where decoration doesn't distract in any way. We didn't want a big crucifixion on the wall - it's basically about books. On the shelves are copies of the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, and "The Cake Bible." Father Gerth likes to cook.
Mr. Jayne also bought new furniture carefully, like a set of ballroom chairs, which were painted an exotic ochre and cushioned with a ribbon-candy stripe.
---"They were $69 each," he said. "It's hard to find a set of chairs that are affordable." Standard ballroom chairs are a good solution, Mr. Jayne explained. " The dining room furniture, especially, was so disparate," he said. "We needed a unifying element."
---The decorator wallpapered the dining room with a custom paper, created on a computer and printed inexpensively on adhesive-backed paper with the same laser process used to make billboard posters.
The decorator chose a plate illustrating stained glass from Owen Jones's 1856 book of designs, "The Grammar of Ornament," blue it up in scale like a Pop painting and used it as a repeat for a pattern.
---"I wanted pattern in one room," Mr. Jayne said. "There's evidence that this house probably had really nice papers. We could have replicated the wallpapers - I have the facilities." The cost was out of the question.

 

 ---"Alison Nash, in my office, did it one night on her Mac," Mr. Jayne said of the "new" 19th-century wallpaper pattern: part A. W. N. Pugin, part Gilbert and George.
---The decorator's trademark modern touches in a traditional interior helped stretch the style quotient elsewhere. In the front parlor, Mr. Jayne used a large square mirror with a thin-lipped red-pink frame above a robust wooden mantel and ceramic-tiled fireplace to give the room a big bounce of brightness and light without the weight of a period picture.
---"There would have been a giant pier mirror there originally," he said, "but it wouldn't have had a slender pink frame. I didn't want an uptight English sitting room here. Anyone can do a Jane Austen rectory. St. Mary's is off Times Square." Two drab Drexel Heritage nesting tables with worn veneers were painted pink to match.
---Upstairs, in the bedrooms, which are "more Spartan or monklike," Mr. Jayne explained, he let required work like floor refinishing carry a large part of the decoration. "It's a natural maple floor color," he said of the warm, butterscotch wood. "You learn to use yor resources. We got such decoration out of just cleaning the floors."
---Mr. Jayne reframed a small document in Father Gerth's bedroom: a certificate awarded in 1907 to Father Grieg Taber, a predecessor at the rectory, for saying the catechism perfectly at age 10. "When you're decorating a large house, it helps to put something personal in the extra bedrooms, to give them personality," Mr. Jayne said.
---If not a homeowner exactly, Father Gerth is a particularly proud resident of both the redecorated rectory and his unlikely New York neighborhood.
---"There's a passage in back, through the Bertelsmann building," Father Gerth said, sitting at home last week, matinee traffic blaring in the street like testamental trumpets. "There's a poster for the music megastore that says,Finally, there's a Virgin in Times Square.'"
---The rector gave what could only be described as a devilish smile. "I think to myself, No. 2 maybe, not No. 1," he said. "There's been a Virgin here since this was Times Square. And her name is Mary.'"