A Legendary Designer’s Book-Filled Library & Studies in NYC

Legendary interior designer Ellie Cullman — co-founder of Cullman & Kravis — walks us through the three most personal rooms of her Park Avenue apartment in New York: the library and two studies where she reads, works, and surrounds herself with a lifetime of books, art, and collected treasures.

The library is her design laboratory, a master class in what she calls layered lighting — seven separate sources, from an overhead Polish chandelier down to picture and bookcase lights.

Triple-glazed blue walls (baby blue, gold stipple, then blue again) keep the walls alive, antique carpets ground the space, and every bookshelf pairs books with something flat and something sculptural, from Delft porcelain to temple blocks from Cambodia.

Her own study leans into her love of orange, wrapped in iridescent Italian couture-woven fabric, with a window seat where she read through the entire pandemic and a clever "ratcheted" bookshelf that hides a structural building column behind the five books she's written.

Her husband's study — the one room she says she could never keep tidy — mixes warm Anigre wood paneling with colored walls, a Stanley Whitney painting, Asian ceremonial objects, and a showstopping Art Deco desk in Macassar ebony and hammered bronze, hand-forged by a modern artisan.

Nothing here was decorated all at once; every room tells you exactly who lives here.