January 12, 2025Seasoned designers know how to delicately balance the two sides of a dichotomy — textured versus smooth, angled versus curved. Doing that, and doing it well, are among the biggest secrets of good decoration.
Married design duo Crystal and Ben Sinclair are very much in on the secret, which proved invaluable when clients recently presented them with a request that contained the ultimate dichotomy. “They asked us to transform their classic-six Manhattan apartment into ‘Studio 54 meets Jackie O,’ ” Crystal remembers the wife saying at an early meeting.
In other words, the clients wanted the designers — who run their studio, Crystal Sinclair Designs, from their home base in the Hudson River Valley’s tony Tuxedo Park — to help them strike the perfect balance between reckless abandon and utter refinement. For the Sinclairs, this was no problem.
“It’s very exciting when a client comes to you with that directive. We love bold and fun and anything that’s not the usual,” says Crystal, who founded her eponymous studio in 2019 after working as a designer for more than a decade in her native Texas. Connecticut-born Ben — a mechanical engineer by training and a former robot designer — joined the firm in 2021, bringing to the table technical drawing and problem-solving skills, along with an innate eye for aesthetics.
The Sinclairs launched into the project with their characteristic enthusiasm, the better to help meld the interior design equivalent of a sophisticated A-line shift dress with a louche leisure suit.
Although it boasted tree-top views of Central Park and a Fifth Avenue location a stone’s throw from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the roughly 2,300-square-foot two-bedroom — in a Rosario Candela–designed Art Moderne building — presented a fair share of challenges.
“The apartment hadn’t been renovated in half a century,” says Crystal. “The kitchen had appliances from the nineteen sixties. I love that era, but this was bad. It needed some love.”
The clients — an empty-nester couple with a French bulldog, Stella — were seeking a jaunty weekend getaway from their main house in suburban New Jersey. The Sinclairs, together with the architectural firm MuNYC, undertook a gut renovation and redesign that would give them just that.
After the entire apartment had been taken down to the studs, the designers began the meticulous process of reworking the layout.
“It had been very chopped up,” recalls Crystal. “The dining room was closed off from the kitchen, so we opened it up. We also created a vestibule that leads into the third bedroom, which was originally the service quarters.” To maximize natural light, they removed walls in the primary bath and installed white-metal and glass partitions.
Once the basic structure was in place, the Sinclairs started on the living room. Using the entire fireplace wall as their canvas, they transformed the surround into a Wonderland–esque checkerboard of oversize honed-marble tiles. The pattern, says Crystal, works so well here because it’s “fun and whimsical but still classic.”
Two other stand-out moments are the wall niches, which were original to the room but rectangular when the Sinclairs came to the project. “We took them full length, domed them and painted stripes,” says Crystal. The playful cabana stripes evoke the magic and mystery of a circus tent, with Benjamin Moore’s Whale Gray and Super White softening a pattern that could otherwise be strident.
Also not to be missed: the disco ball nestled into a Rococo-style medallion that looks like a giant tuft of wedding-cake icing piped onto the ceiling.
“That was last,” says Crystal, referring to the ball, which was the room’s finishing touch. “I’ve never done one before, so I had to Google where to buy it. It’s thirty-two inches, and, yes, it really turns!”
The designers scored the 1950s modular boomerang sofa on 1stDibs. During the same shopping spree on the site, they snatched up a sleek mid-century-modern two-headed floor lamp by Rupert Nikoll, a wildly exaggerated wing chair by DeMuro Das and a custom lapis-lazuli-blue Pepino daybed by Owl, which looks like a sleeve of jumbo Tootsie Rolls.
The Sinclairs further amped up the sparkle by commissioning two oversize roundel mirrors — one convex, the other concave — to flank the fireplace. These help bounce light around the room while advancing the funhouse narrative in a surprisingly elegant manner.
Living room sorted, the Sinclairs moved on to the kitchen. Jazzing up the all-white cooking space the clients requested proved among the project’s most difficult tasks.
“We wanted depth and contrast, but to use the boldly veined Arabescato marble took some convincing. It ended up being the perfect backdrop. It has movement, but it’s not too colorful.”
Meanwhile in New Jersey: Crystal Sinclair Reimagines a 120-Year-Old Hoboken Townhouse
The designers had to tackle another quirk in the historic building — this time in the dining room, which has one rounded end and another that is squared off. “We wanted to follow the curve of the room and design off the center point,” says Crystal. To do so, they created a custom starburst rug based on a design from their line of carpets.
The designers juxtaposed that fluffy, hand-knotted wool rug and the soft curves of B&B Italia’s Flair O’ Swivel chairs with the sharp angles and cool metallic legs of an Egg Collective dining table.
A final issue here was the room’s lack of places to display art. “When you have curved walls, there’s no place to hang anything,” says Crystal. To add a splash of color, they instead painted the ceiling a shade that blends hints of earthy brown with an ethereal powder blue.
The tension between the dining room’s plaster medallion and the spiky Murano-glass Sputnik light hanging from it — found at Red Rose Antiques — is an example of how the Sinclairs “find the balance and contrast between form, dimension and scale,” says Crystal. “It’s all very intentional.”
The Sinclairs executed this balancing act again and again throughout the home, cleverly infusing each room with the elegant sophistication of Jackie O. and the dazzling glamour of Studio 54.
One could argue, though, that the stunning result owes most to Jackie — in all her 1970s headscarfed, bell-bottomed and oversize-sunglass-wearing glory. Chic in the highest degree.
