Step Inside a Lavish Upper East Side Home Reimagined With Bold Moves

In this area, hidden paneling contains the entrance to what Korban dubs the color-saturated “blue room,” with a foundation of bespoke Le Manach Pierre Frey wall-to-wall carpet. “If I’m going to have a house with so many rooms, I want to do a room with color and print,” Korban notes. Farrow & Ball’s Hague Blue “feels very royal, and the house certainly has that aesthetic.” French doors then open onto a luxurious light-filled solarium with a bench seat and accessories swathed in Loro Piana cashmere fabrics. Korban likens the flow to “a Russian doll of rooms.” There’s plenty of privacy in the form of distinct parents’ and kids’ quarters on the third and fourth levels, respectively, plus the fifth-floor conservatory dedicated to fun and play.

The interior corridor lined with mirrors and Rose Uniacke sconces links the main house with the carriage house and continues Korban’s newly introduced chromatic vocabulary. Despite its pristine condition, “the house was heavy before,” so the designer and his clients landed on a white-on-white scheme with lacquered ceilings as a tool to “breathe this whole new life into it.” The carriage house functions as an expanded multipurpose living room of sorts, with a generously sized sectional Cassina sofa. Korban describes programming this interior as putting “everything in one lofty feeling [space]. So it satiated any appetite for wanting an open plan sort of room.” Here, different eras converge beneath the vaulted corners thanks to striking works by Richard Prince and Damien Hirst.

The project smoothly gelled over approximately four years “because the clients were so on board with what I do, and because the property was the kind of property that I love,” Korban says. Juxtapositions between old and new are on view in the carriage house, where works by Damien Hirst and Richard Prince mingle with richly paneled walls and vaulted niches. A Miloe sectional sofa by Piero Lissoni for Cassina is conducive to large group gatherings. Custom plaster chandelier is by Bourgeois Boheme. Garonne sconces are from Korban’s collection for RH.

Art: © Richard Prince

Putting this piece of New York City grandeur into a fresh context was a personal retrospective for the designer himself too. The final result is “all the things that I’ve always wanted to use together,” Korban comments, pointing to favorites such as Eric Schmitt’s ring-shaped Anneau chandeliers, Liaigre furnishings and lamps, and pieces from Korban’s own furniture line. Over the past four-plus years the designer has spent ushering this home into its next chapter, he’s reconciled the shifting nature of how spaces and functionality are valued. Korban adds, “It’s okay to be a little bit impractical sometimes.”