Daily News from New York, New York • 213

Midtown Accumulation ANDREW CARNEGIE'S Engineer's Club, built near Bryant Park in 1907, boasted a grand staircase, an impressive dining room and ballroom, and on the higher floors, bedrooms. The building was turned into co-op apartments in the late 1970s, and the new landlords divided the high-ceilinged rooms, transforming some into duplexes, adding stairs and sleeping balconies. The results are strangely shaped, long, narrow rooms, but all have a great deal more character than the usual bland shoeboxes of most New York apartments. Many have retained their deeply molded plaster ceilings, elaborate crown moldings, overscale fireplaces, and Honduran mahogany woodwork. Though many residents use the upper floor as a bedroom, designer Sheila Shwartz put in a wall of glassfronted closets, and prefers to use a convertible bed downstairs.

The apartment possesses an unusually large fireplace which would have made sense when the room was twice as big with a front of malachitelooking green marble. It makes a perfect display shelf. A small but workable kitchen, a powder room, a walk-in closet, and an workroom with space for a large desk, a cupboard and two chairs complete the layout. Meals are eaten by the window that overlooks Bryant Park. Sheila is an inveterate collector and her habitat teems 1 with everchanging decor.

One day, a group of worn-leather saddles might be piled over the sofa. China-headed dolls on miniature wicker chairs, bunches of extraordinary walking sticks, old globes, silver hair brushes, vintage sports items, glitter globs, gravy boats, and hat stands are all mixed up in a fantastical array. Given the ferreting, acquisitive skill of the owner, this apartment always will be a place of wonder. A wool and bear fur interspersed with Surrounding it are Modern Crafts rows of metal washers and fringed chairs with gray EDWARD AND SUSIE ELSON OF Atlanta keep a grand Park Avenue pied-a-terre- a duplex penthouse, into which light pours through suave floor-to-ceiling windows and provides a setting for the furnishings that Mrs. Elson, an avid supporter of the crafts movement, commissioned.

Branching off the long entrance hall is the living room. Confronted by its grand piano, one cannot resist a smile. The instrument started life in late 19th-century Dresden but was completely reconstructed as a piece of sculpture. Each leg is a neoBrancusiesque-via-Memphis work of art; every surface is coated with varied, unexpected hues of shiny automobile paint; even the inner workings are meticulously colored. Equally entertaining is the fireplace, decorated with a face and hands.

There is a rug made of strips of woven stainless-steel suede seats and back with woolen pigtails. Comfortable upholstered furniture includes gray velvet-covered armchairs made in the 1930s and a sofa covered in textured leather, wrinkled to resemble elephant hide. The room contains several chairs that are designed not for comfort but for their sculptural qualities. One combines polished brass, red-painted metal and wire. Two others are of twisted wire.

Next to the living room is the master bedroom and accompanying bathroom. For the bedroom, Mrs. Elson commissioned an impressive four-poster bed in blond maple inlaid with ebony. A full moon of silvered gold is set on the center of the headboard and silvery tips terminate each of the four posts, like guardian saints. A simple geometric rug lies on the blond maple floor.

Shelves in the dining room display a collection of art glass. The table is a great circular expanse of polished terrazzo. DAILY NEWS pads. The porch is appointed with live greenery and wicker furniture. In this room, the flooring changes from the warm maple to a cooler gray-stained oak inlaid with maple.

A wall displays ceramics. A glass coffee table looks positively lethal; it is made of what appears to be broken glass held together by rusty bolts. On the table is a moon-headed man riding a toylike horse, a woven silver basket and an aluminum plate. Another table is topped by a pink vinyl pie frill. MAGAZINE OCTOBER 7, 1990 15.