This is going to be about the room, not the food, because there wasn’t any. Not yet. There sat the architect Brad Cloepfil last Wednesday, four days before the restaurant was to open — reopen, really — in a chair he had designed in middle of the room he had designed — redesigned, really — saying that the idea had been to make the room “calmer.”

This was after he had called the project “one of the most stressful things I’ve ever done.”

The room is a restaurant, not just any restaurant but the soaring Art Deco sanctuary of the celebrated Eleven Madison Park (three stars from Michelin, four from The New York Times). It closed in June — after serving an 11-course, $295 greatest-hits tasting menu for several weeks — so that the old interior could be demolished and Mr. Cloepfil’s built. It is to reopen on Sunday.

The new room is pleasantly muted, with whites and off-whites everywhere. It is more symmetrical than the room it replaced, which began as a brasserie, and wool-and-silk area rugs are now set into the terrazzo floors. He said he got the idea for the patterns on the rugs from looking at wet leaves on the sidewalk in Madison Square Park, across the street. “They’re abstractions of that,” he said.

Maybe the cups and saucers, also his, contributed to the pressure. He was not called on to design tableware for other big projects like Studio Bell, the new home of Canada’s National Music Centre in Calgary, Alberta, or for Uniqlo City, the headquarters of Fast Retailing in Tokyo. Nor were cups and saucers his responsibility for the new United States Embassy in Mozambique, on 10 acres overlooking the Indian Ocean in Maputo.