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"View Slideshow\n\nHere is a theory I cannot substantiate but feel certain is true: For every 10 of us who like red, for every 50 of us who like blue, there is only one among us who likes purple, though with a fervor the rest of us will never know.\n\nThis dazzling new Manhattan pied-\u00E0-terre was created for one of those believers. It has lavender upholstery and lavender curtains and lavender carpeting and lavender fringe on lavender pillows. The Hershey's Kisses and M&amp;amp;M's in the candy dishes are lavender. \"People are always giving me purple presents. I have friends who wear lavender when they know they're going to see me,\" the owner says.\n\nShe was 16 years old when she put on her first purple blouse and discovered the power of this color to light up the face and lift the spirit. Many years later, in Palm Beach, she would have that feeling all over again, when she entered a room by the interior designer Geoffrey Bradfield. \"Seeing that room was like hearing the Beatles for the first time,\" she says.\n\nLike his client's signature color, Geoffrey Bradfield emanates positive vibrations. His beautiful clothes and lovely manners could brighten any dinner table, and there is an optimistic streak in his work, which often combines his love of old-fashioned Hollywood glamour with his interest in new materials and technology and the future. Old movies are nice, but it's also nice to believe that the best is yet to come.\n\nIn this cinematic apartment, high above New York City, Bradfield and his associate, Douglas Wittels, set out to create the see-you-tonight-at-the-Stork-Club-darlings atmosphere of a penthouse in 1940s MGM Manhattan. It is located in one of the city's most distinctive residences, part apartment tower, part office building, a midcentury-modern landmark with a very glamorous address. The apartment encompasses two 2,000-square-foot units, one on top of the other, which had been combined clumsily by a previous corporate owner. \"The duplex was less than the sum of the apartments,\" says architect Gavin Macrae-Gibson, whose New York firm untangled the considerable problems of the shell. \"There was a frustrating lack of spatial connection and no clear sense of which floor was the main one. No dimension was more than 20 feet. My intentions were to create drama, openness, lightness, spatial flow and appreciation for the panoramic views.\"\n\nThe entrance remains on the upper level; only now you feel that you've arrived, seeing a vast new living room unfurl in front of you. The new dining room, kitchen and library/media room are on the lower level. Each floor has two bedrooms. Connecting them all is a stainless-steel staircase with\u2014thank you, Geoffrey Bradfield\u2014a purple-striped runner as cheerful as a Kate Spade bag.\n\nThe enemy of glamour is a low ceiling. This apartment suffered from an insistent rhythm of big, square windows that topped off too low and brought the ceiling down visually. Roman shades now would have you believe that the living room windows continue several feet higher, an illusion reinforced by tall panels of book-matched fiddleback anegr\u00E9 between them; and in the bedroom, boldly striped taffeta draperies lead the eye upward with the same result. To further the illusion, the horizon line was kept low.\n\n\"In any room, what's critical is the scale of the furniture,\" says Wittels. \"The seat heights are only 18 inches, and the back heights only 28 inches. It makes the apartment look very streamlined and contributes to the Art Moderne feeling.\"\n\n\"I've had such an adventure because of this palette,\" says Bradfield, explaining that purple has been a somewhat rare color in American interior design lately and that he has never really had an opportunity to explore it. Sometimes it is described as the color of royalty and sometimes as the color of free spirits; popes, flappers, hippies and Barbie have all been attracted to it, but it has never seemed to suit the spirit of our era. \"The last time it was very big was in the '60s,\" the designer says. \"Mary Quant used it with orange. David Hicks used it with green. Yves Saint Laurent turned purple and olive into the great combination.\"\n\nThe client could hardly believe her eyes when he made his initial presentation of fabrics. \"I was so moved,\" she says. \"I couldn't believe he could find so many fabrics in my color. And he brought me variations on a theme, not repetition.\" There is no strong pattern but an amazing range of textures. You cannot resist running your hand across the chenille or the carved checkerboard of the sofas, or the sculpted basket weave of the master bedroom carpet. You would take a bite out of one of the pillows if you didn't know better; they're like candy hearts.\n\n\"Purple is a very sensual color, though it's not for the faint of heart,\" says Bradfield. \"It has to be used with economy, and it has to be balanced with other colors to achieve its full contribution.\"  Ice-blue accents, creamy Venetian plaster walls and a pair of pink-lacquered French armchairs introduce that balance here, with the help of two swirling white Aubusson-style rugs that Bradfield designed. The Frankenthaler canvas that dominates the living room, so big it had to be removed from its stretchers and rolled up to get it into the elevator and through the door, also counters the lavenders with its vast field of coral. Titled Crete, the painting says \"landscape\" to Bradfield and \"heat\" to its owners, and it is hard to imagine this room without it.\n\nA Bradfield room is always tightly edited. Every detail counts. The upholstered pieces here have brushed-steel feet that read like jewelry. French furniture from the 1940s has iron scrolls and mirrored facets that attract the eye. \"Brushed steel, aluminum, glass\u2014all of these materials together make a statement very reflective of the 21st century,\" says Wittels. Even the baby grand piano, the centerpiece of the upper level, is not the usual black box. One of about 60 built by the Dutch manufacturer Rippen in 1965, originally lacquered in a pastel, it has been stripped to its cast-aluminum shell and looks like it could play Rhapsody in Blue by itself. It is so unlike a piano in every way that, the client says, \"you really don't feel as if you're playing a piano.\"\n\nThe color commitment in this apartment is no passing fancy. \"I would like to have more carpeting made, to stockpile it, just in case,\" the wife says. Her husband has come to appreciate the salutary effects of purple almost as much as she does. But their two sons have begun, as children will, forging their own direction. Their favorite color is blue. For the moment they are only teenagers, but the fabric manufacturers and candy makers of the world would be wise to get ready."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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