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"View Slideshow\n\nThere are conventional before-and-after projects, in which an architect and a designer turn a warren of small rooms into a state-of-the-art kitchen or add a modern wing to a Colonial house. Then there are before-and-after projects with stories behind them\u2014the kind even a novelist would find difficult to imagine. Real estate developer Charles S. Cohen's Park Avenue apartment fits into this category.\n\nSeveral years ago, after Cohen and his wife were divorced, he went looking for a spacious wreck. He had been in the business almost all of his adult life; in 1988 he purchased Cohen Brothers Realty Corporation, which was founded by his father and his uncles. He believed he could bring a developer's knowledge to the table and \"buy a wreck right\"\u2014real estate jargon for a wreck at the right price.\n\nHe found a dilapidated residence on the 16th and 17th floors of a cooperative building. In a previous incarnation it had been a large duplex apartment. Then, Cohen was told, an investor bought it and began to demolish it with the intention of converting the space into five separate apartments. During the demolition phase, the developer went off to Atlantic City on a gambling jaunt. He lost money, pledged the apartments as collateral and kept losing. When he defaulted on his debt, Caesars Atlantic City became the owner of the property. He bought it from the hotel and casino's owners.\n\nIn the fall of 1996 Cohen purchased Manhattan's Decoration Design Building. He was in Paris for an international fabric fair the following year and had dinner at the H\u00F4tel Costes, which had been decorated by Jacques Garcia. \"I'd never seen anything like it,\" he says. \"The Costes is a throwback to a long-ago time, but with its finger on the pulse of today. Garcia is known for his use of reds, and the H\u00F4tel Costes is known for its reds\u2014and I liked those rich reds.\" He arranged to meet Garcia and eventually asked him to design the Park Avenue duplex. It is the first residence in the United States designed by the Parisian.\n\nCohen told Garcia that he wanted the space to be \"a showcase,\" as befitted the owner of the DD Building. \"I wanted it to be an environment that could be used to entertain the interior design world,\" he says.\n\nIn Cohen's opinion, his showcase required at least two double-height areas, to give it \"a sense of luxury.\" The entrance hall is one such room, the library another. \"I gave Jacques virtual carte blanche to create the many moldings and columns throughout the apartment,\" he says. \"Some people only get plaster of Paris, but I had plasterers from Paris on scaffolds in my place for months.\"\n\nThere are fluted Corinthian columns in the entrance hall, Doric columns in the gallery\u2014which also has a barrel-vaulted, coffered ceiling made of fibrous plaster with a mahogany finish\u2014and 19th-century French versions of Greek decorative panels high above the second-story bookcases in the library.\n\nThe property is 7,500 square feet, most of it on the 16th floor; Cohen was able to buy a sixth apartment in the building after the renovation had begun. The 16th floor includes bedrooms for his two children (who visit often), a guest room, a living room, a dining room, a family room and the lower part of the library. Red and gold predominate in most rooms, though the library is blue and gold.\n\n\"The colors we used in Charles's place are a bit more vivid than we would use in France,\" says Michael Chambers, chef de projet for D\u00E9coration Jacques Garcia and lead designer on the Cohen project. \"The quality of light and the energy of Manhattan seemed to warrant a strong response,\" he explains. \"The yellow Venetian-plaster finish in the library complements the light-colored wood particularly well. Our French clients tend to be fairly conservative. With Charles it was great to up the ante.\"\n\nCohen asked that the fabrics and furniture have a French look and not be easily available in New York. Many of the velvets and taffetas are from a handful of notable companies in France. \"Jacques Garcia does not use chintz,\" Chambers says, adding that it was necessary to buy some fabrics and furniture in Italy and the United Kingdom\u2014\"French sofas are finer, but English sofas are more comfortable\"\u2014and a few in the United States. The hardware, most of the lighting and the china and crystal were imported from France.\n\nCohen respects Garcia's attention to detail. \"I visited Jacques's incredible ch\u00E2teau, Champ de Bataille, in Normandy,\" he says. \"He bought a 19th-century collection of dried medicinal plants and had some framed and mounted.\" Garcia brought some of the plants to New York for Cohen. The herbarium panels are in the family room.\n\nThe 17th floor consists primarily of a master suite and a gym, and it is Cohen's private domain. \"I think my bedroom is the most spectacular room in the apartment,\" he says. \"It was inspired by one of the council chambers at the Ch\u00E2teau de Malmaison. I love the tented ceiling and the mahogany spears behind the bed, which are belted around a central lighting core.\"\n\nA thoroughly modern man, Cohen expresses as much admiration for Jacques Garcia's Old World touches as he does for his ability to disguise the video, audio and lighting systems and the new heating and air-conditioning systems. \"It's amazing what I've had put in behind the walls, above the ceilings and below the floors,\" he says. \"I have all the latest technology. There are two plasma-screen televisions in the apartment, including one in the sitting room of the master suite. I love putting these TVs in antique frames. I can display a scene from North by Northwest, or, with a flip of a switch, I can turn on a CD-ROM representation of a van Gogh painting. This apartment is not only about the wonders of yesterday, it's about the marvels of tomorrow.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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