Start building your dream
Cherry Blossoms in the Sky: A Park Avenue Pied-à-Terre Transformed
14 October 2024
Project Inspiration
In this elegant Park Avenue pied-à-terre, designer Phillip Thomas masterfully blends cherished memories with contemporary design.
Tasked with downsizing from a six-story townhouse to a two-bedroom apartment, Thomas infused the space with deep personal meaning.
Inspired by his clients' love of Japanese block prints, especially cherry blossoms, he created a striking gallery lined with hand-painted silk and metallic wallpapers. At the heart of the design is Gabriel Scott’s Myriad Chandelier, customized to evoke a floating cherry blossom branch. In this interview, Phillip shares his design process, the importance of lighting, and how he transforms interiors into personal narratives.
Project Overview / What was the project brief?
My clients were downsizing from a 6 story townhouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side to a smaller two bedroom pied-a-terre. After 40 years of building memories in their townhouse, it was time to consolidate into a smaller apartment, leaving space for creating new memories and giving new meaning to cherished items.
What Gabriel Scott items did you specify for this project & why?
The Myriad Series Chandelier from the artists at Gabriel Scott was the perfect focal point for this Gallery space where the fixture became a three dimensional representation of the cherry blossom—one singular branch suspended in mid air.
The Gallery of the apartment is the first introduction for people arriving at this home. My clients are passionate about Japanese block prints and especially of the cherry blossoms depicted in those prints. We took that love of cherry blossoms to create our own cherry tree grove filled with blossoms hand painted on to silk and metallic papers by De Gournay lining the walls and ceilings of the space.
Did you customize these pieces to work with the project? If so, how?
Ceiling height is always an important factor that we consider in our projects. The higher the feeling of the space, the greater the value of the space. To that end, we worked with the team at Gabriel Scott to ensure as tight a feel of the chandelier to the ceiling without it losing the wonderful airy quality that the Myriad Series has by nature.
How do you use lighting to elevate the spaces you design?
Lighting is essential to the success of any space. There are so many things that light can do to transform a space and to impact the way an individual experiences it. It can help make a space feel bigger. It can even make the same space feel more intimate.
Architectural lighting is the foundation on top of which we use decorative lighting, such as chandeliers and sconces, to reach the desired end result in our spaces. I like to think of decorative lighting as jewelry for interiors.
What was your favorite part of designing this project?
I love to tell stories in the spaces that I design. In the case of this project, I was taking a lifetime of memories and experiences and consolidating them into a smaller space. Every square inch of this project is immersed with meaning. It was particularly exciting to be able to take pieces from the past and incorporate them with contemporary pieces to give everything in the space a fresh appeal.
With special thanks to:
Designer: Phillip Thomas – Phillip Thomas Inc.
Photographer: Genevieve Garruppo
Project: Park Avenue, New York, NY