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"View Slideshow\n\nHedge fund manager and asset allocator Arthur J. Pergament made two expeditious decisions in the wake of a divorce: to keep the same prewar Park Avenue apartment and to keep it anything but the same\u2014 point of fact, to expunge, if not exorcise, all traces of its existing d\u00E9cor. The designer he hired, New York- and Palm Beach-based Scott Snyder, annihilatingly pronounced it \"too fussy, too feminine, too pink\u2014 no point of view, no common bond to the furnishings and no continuity between rooms.\" Pergament himself summed it up as \"just a case of previous decorators cutting their teeth on my budget.\"\n\nHaving taken the measure of his client (\"He has a very large masculine\u2014 could even call it a commanding\u2014\"), Snyder recommended that Pergament proceed in the direction of \"French and Empire,\" which would give the apartment a cohesive Neoclassical character. \"The minute Scott proposed Paris to me for the feeling, I said, Let's do it, let's make that happen,' \" Pergament recalls.\n\nHe promptly put all the old stuff up for auction, and then Snyder went on to assemble an estimable collection of furniture within a mere five-month period\u2014 cross section of mostly late-18th- and early-19th-century French, Russian, Swedish and even Chinese pieces, all more or less similar in line and detail. \"I didn't say no to anything, because we were rolling,\" says Pergament. \"One lesson I'd learned in life is that if somebody's on the right track, you don't throw them off\u2014 the contrary, you keep them going. At long last I had a decorator who was picking things that would make real points of difference in any room I could possibly imagine.\"\n\nSnyder, together with project designer Mark Kelly, now zeroed in on the apartment itself. The walls of the entrance gallery were faux-limestoned, and the black-and-white marble, which they felt made the space look small, was replaced with oak flooring stenciled in a Swedish and Greek-key design; and the mahogany paneling in the library was jettisoned in favor of a Swedish stri\u00E9 finish in three shades of beige. The palette needed to be neutral\u2014\"I wanted that Armani-Prada-Gucci coloring, all those beige monotones,\" Pergament explains\u2014 order to set off the art, which consisted mostly of works on paper, a staggering 70 of them Picassos. \"It was very generous of him to entrust us with placing the pictures,\" Snyder maintains. \"He told us, Just hang them\u2014 have no priorities; I have no hierarchies.' \"\n\nOn a table in the living room, within inches of a Picasso-Pissarro-and-Braque-ensplendored wall, Snyder drolly placed a bronze sculpture called The Yawner because \"its expression is priceless.\" Pergament adds, \"It looks like Bruce Willis yawning\u2014 I love Bruce Willis.\" Nor did the larks end there\u2014 designer recounts how, one day at Christie's, his client saw an impressively scaled marble-and-hardstone bust of a Roman emperor: \"Not only didn't it scare him off, he said, I love it\u2014\u2014 are we using it?'\" In the entrance gallery, it went without saying. And there it remains\u2014 reifying presence (asked what the piece has to say to him, Pergament readily replies, \"Power! Empowerment!\").\n\nThe golden-brown-chenille-walled master bedroom, with its mahogany-and-tufted-leather bed, its 19th-century marble-and-porphyry wall plaques of Roman eminences and its lone marble torso, is reassuringly masculine. The Neoclassical Russian secretary flanking the bed has an exceptional strength to it, and the striped silk-velvet draperies with their arrowy Neoclassical design make the room feel taller. \"I have my Degas ballerina and my L'Hermitte oil there,\" Pergament says. \"And my Matisse woman in the blue chair\u2014's there because it just felt like she should be there, being nude.\"\n\nThe bedroom's French Empire chandelier once swung in designer Gianni Versace's double town house on East 64th Street, also erstwhile home to two of the antique chairs in the apartment. \"I showed a lot of restraint here, if I say so myself,\" Pergament says. \"I didn't over-purchase at the Versace sale just because it was a big standing-room-only Sotheby's celebrity auction. I bought only the three things that were right for the look we wanted and within range. I'm an investor, remember\u2014 buy things within a proper range. And frankly, although I do wear some Versace myself for special occasions, I was afraid that his cachet might not last.\"\n\nIn the dining room, \"the masculinity is finally eased,\" as Snyder puts it. To be sure, it's the softest, most romantic room in the apartment\u2014 largely to Henri Martin's oil, La Vallee, which is steeped in the olive-and-dun colors of Provence. \"I'm very conscious of what art you look at when you're eating\u2014 certainly don't want to be looking at the severity of Picasso,\" the designer says, adding that the client had wanted paintings rather than drawings in the room.\n\n\"The four children were met with, and they each described exactly what they wanted for their rooms\u2014 father stayed completely out of it,\" Snyder recounts. The sons, ages nine and 11 at the time, asked that the room they shared be made to incorporate their collection of sports memorabilia. The older daughter, then 13 and partial to pink and gold, was given a Louis XV-style writing table lacquered the color of bubble gum. \"She wanted dangling things, too, so she got a beaded trim,\" the designer confides. \"And she also got her own little Warhol print\u2014 Life Savers.\"\n\nThe younger daughter, then seven, was crazy about purple. So her fuzzy-fabric rhinestone-button armchair is mauve and her plaid rug lavender, and there are hand-painted pansies on her commode and curtains, and faience pansy plates on her wall. \"Why should the children not live as well as the rest of the house?\" Snyder asks rhetorically. \"If you give them 19th-century faience that matches their curtains, it will help with their values. It will make them feel important. They'll say to themselves: I'm going to be neater, more orderly; I'm not going to get nail polish on the carpet; I'm not going to write on the walls.' Whereas if you give them a blank canvas, they probably will be writing on their walls. Look, it's not taking their childhood away from them\u2014 can always go to their playroom or computer room to be messy. The wonderful thing here is that their father has shown them with their bedrooms that he trusts and respects them.\"\n\nAn appreciable measure of the client's trust and respect is reserved for his decorators. \"I needed the apartment redone in just a few months, and Scott and Mark delivered without compromising on anything,\" Pergament attests. \"They worked at warp speed\u2014 were relentless, detail-to-the-nth-degree kind of guys. And Scott,\" he adds, paying Snyder a hedge-fund-manager-and-asset-allocator's ultimate compliment, \"certainly knew where to put the money. I mean, pieces like the fold-out Russian tables he got me, they're extraordinary. He's moved things to a different asset class\u2014 look at the apartment now as part of my balance sheet.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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