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"View Slideshow\n\nI think our next apartment will be lighter and more modern,\" Elissa Cullman told Architectural Digest in 1998. Little did she dream then that the airy new surroundings she envisioned wouldn't even require acquiring a new address, that the always expected \"next\" apartment would in fact be the same apartment\u2014the very 14-room duplex in a gold-standard prewar Park Avenue building that she'd been living in since the mid-1980s. With their three children grown and flown, the designer and her husband, Edgar Cullman, Jr., a partner in a family equity firm, had toyed with the idea of segueing to something a bit less baronial, before wisely deciding to stay right where they were and embark on a vitalizing adventure of the imagination.\n\nJust how, one well might ask, did Elissa Cullman accomplish this incredible feat of moving without moving? By recourse to her profession's trusty arsenal of Rs renovating, refining and refreshing\u2014in her case all to a preternatural degree. The first and most exigent of the three Rs drove the couple out the door and into a sublet for the better, or worse, part of a year. In the meantime, the architect with whom Cullman collaborates the most on her multifarious projects, John B. Murray, updated the duplex's infrastructure, built handsome new cabinetry and bookshelf units, and took the measure of the changed family dynamic by converting the three vacated rooms\u2014the daughter's into a glamorous eglomise-paneled dressing room for Cullman, the older son's into an anegre-and-Ultrasuede study for Cullman's husband, and the younger son's into a proper guest room.\n\n\"The place now is much more a reflection of Ellie and Edgar's personalities,\" a longtime friend of the couple's comments.\n\nThen, with the help of Lee Cavanaugh, her longtime senior project manager, the designer took the apartment from classic 18th-century English to what she calls 21stcentury fusion \"Now I have both\u2014the comfortable envelope of the home I raised my kids in for 20 years and the excitement of something very different.\" Her Chinese and Japanese art and antiques\u2014as well as her Chippendale and Regency pieces\u2014retain their old importances in the apartment, to be sure, but everything boringly brown or too predictably traditional has been unsentimentally expelled.\n\nAmong the salient new objects are the pair of Regency brass-inlaid dwarf cabinets in the dining room; the Regency green-lacquered chinoiserie partners desk in Cullman's study; \"my first Polish chandelier,\" in the library; and the ancient sandstone male divinity from India in the entrance hall, which supplanted an American tall case clock whose monotonous beat and heavy presence had gotten on Cullman's decorating nerves.\n\nAs for that thing called fusion, its manifestations are everywhere. Take the library, where the designer's old Dutch delft pottery and her recently acquired third-century Gandharan relief panels come artfully to terms on the same shelves. Or the living room, where a long-entrenched 17th-century black-lacquered chinoiserie low table harmonizes with a newly purchased table made of ebony-and-ivory paneling from Goa.\n\nWith the place taking fresh shape, the couple's collection of mid- and late-19th-century and early-20th-century American paintings and works on paper cried out to be rehung. Cullman obliged by giving the pictures more room to breathe, especially in the stairwell, where they'd been the most densely clustered. But there was still \"so much information on the walls there in terms of the art\" that, to counterbalance things and \"add sparkle and drama\" to the entrance hall, she rolled up her floral Aubusson in favor of a boldly geometric faux-inlaid floor suggested by one she'd seen in a St. Petersburg palace.\n\nAs for that thing called fusion, its manifestations are everywhere.\n\nMeanwhile the Cullmans had been acquiring art that was determinedly more modern. And here, too, fusion rules. In the living room, the Cubist seated woman in the 1952 Max Weber oil new to the apartment has something to say\u2014something enlivening\u2014to the seated woman in the 1901 Edmund Tarbell portrait diagonally across from her; and the latter lady's highly textured ball gown is then thrillingly picked up, as it were, by the rich brushstrokes of the recently purchased Willem de Kooning oil-on-vellum nearby. Bought at the same time, Adolph Gottlieb's 1972 abstract painting The Green One took instant root in the Indian floral pattern hand-embroidered on a raw silk ground that embowers both the walls and the curtains of Cullman's study. Burnishing the library is Kenneth Noland's 1962 iconic target painting Warm Reverie, of which the designer remarks \"So many of the decisions I have to make in my work are driven by considerations of color that to live with a picture by one of the great masters of the medium is particularly meaningful to me.\"\n\nThe colors in Elissa Cullman's own apartment were achieved by such sleights of hand of the decorating trade as glazing, gilding, stenciling, Venetian-stuccoing, and distempering. \"Not one wall is plain-painted,\" she points out, unable to resist adding that in the 19th century plain paint was called dead paint. \"The place now is much more a reflection of Ellie and Edgar's personalities,\" a longtime friend of the couple's comments. \"It's fresher, lighter, more energetic.\"\n\nMore energetic? And how! A live current runs through it."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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