The landscape architect Thomas Woltz doesn’t usually work at home. But one day, he was sketching at the breakfast table in his West Village sanctuary when he had an “aha!” moment for his design of the Public Square and gardens of Hudson Yards, the enormous new development on the West Side of Manhattan.

“It was one of those desperate moments of asking, ‘What is the essence of this project?’” said Mr. Woltz, 51, nattily dressed, as usual, in a suit. That was where he came up with the idea of the pattern underlying the project.

“The plan is a series of ellipses” that converge under the sculpture known as the “Vessel,” and “each radiates out to the different towers and into the retail. Wherever you arrive to Hudson Yards, you arrive to one of these soft embraces of the landscape,” he said.

Such descriptions are not unusual for Mr. Woltz, the principal of the firm Nelson Byrd Woltz, and he approaches art-collecting in the same thoughtful way. Though he divides his time between New York and Charlottesville, Va., he has devoted considerable attention to making his apartment here a home.