This article originally appeared in the April 2014 issue of Architectural Digest.

If you could do it all over—your home, not your life—what would you change? As perfect as we try to make our places, we never quite succeed. Wouldn’t it be better if the ceilings were just a few inches higher? Or the floorboards a bit wider—and maybe a shade darker?

Some people fix these things. Some don’t—or can’t. The latter was certainly the case for architect Steven Harris and his partner, interior designer Lucien Rees Roberts, at their Manhattan studio apartment, where they lived together for nearly three decades. The home had some fantastic aspects. It was rent stabilized, and the main space was large and perfectly proportioned—24 feet long by 18 feet wide, with three windows and 12-foot ceilings. The problem? That one lovely room was basically it, with a compact kitchen, tiny bathroom, and windowless sleeping alcove tacked on.

Then six years ago Harris and Rees Roberts found a promising upgrade in a Tribeca loft building: a 1,600-square-foot floor-through that was more than twice the size of the studio. It was in a great location as well, right across the street from the offices their firms share. But what made the apartment really ideal was that it let them keep the much-loved old one—sort of. That’s because the new place, measuring roughly 25 feet wide and featuring three street-facing windows, allowed them the novel opportunity to re-create their former space, as a gracious living room in the front third of the loft. It was their previous home as they always dreamed it could be.





1 / 7 Chevron Chevron White-oak paneling lines the living room, which is appointed with a sofa in a Nancy Corzine silk velvet and a pair of vintage Swedish swivel chairs; the large artwork on the easel is by Rees Roberts’s brother Marcus, the 1952 wood-frame chair is by Jorge Zalszupin, and the carpet is Moroccan.

Whereas the studio had painted Sheetrock walls, the new living room is lined in paneling of sandblasted white oak (an homage to Art Deco giant Jean-Michel Frank), with a fireplace worked into the layout. "When we finished designing this apartment, it immediately felt like the same place we’d lived in for decades," Harris says. "It has the same proportions, the same windows. That side table with the Madonna statue is in the same position, that gateleg table was in that exact spot. There’s a real familiarity."

While perfecting the past was the couple’s biggest challenge in the living room, the rest of the apartment presented other quandaries. Though much larger than their former home, the loft is by no means as expansive as many of the interiors they have designed for clients. Still, the pair wanted to enjoy what Harris calls "our greatest hits" from those projects. They wanted a dining room suitable for a decent-size dinner party, a library that could hold all their books, a well-equipped kitchen, a master suite with his-and-his closets, an office, a guest room, and an area where either one could retreat for a bit of privacy—a place to read in the middle of the night. And they wanted to give the apartment a sense of classical Italian symmetry, echoing the three windows in the front room.