AREA interior design

In gut renovating an Upper East Side apartment for a hotelier who loves to entertain, AREA interior design’s Janine Carendi MacMurray had offsetting the living room’s low ceiling height top of mind. She raised doorways and added coffered insets to the ceiling to add visual lift, while keeping the horizontals taut with long and lean custom-designed furniture. Dramatic lighting was another priority for the designer, who deployed a pair of mid-century Murano glass sconces — found, like the Art Deco club chairs and the Lucite-and-brass coffee table, on 1stDibs — and a 1960s chandelier by the Austrian manufacturer Kalmar. “The quality of the crystal is so evident in the way it reflects light,” says MacMurray.