Real Estate

Habitats | Upper East Side

A Painter’s Six-Room Canvas

Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times

The home of Catharine Warren, who lives with her husband, Bradley Geist, is decorated with antiques, heirlooms, her paintings and those of other artists.

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THE third-floor apartment on East 80th Street where Catharine Warren, a painter, lives with her husband, Bradley Geist, a semiretired patent lawyer, is almost preternaturally quiet. The walls are so thick that the traffic is not even a whisper. Town houses sit snugly on either side, yet the nearest neighbor might be miles away.

Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times

Ms. Warren is a painter.

Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times

When the couple bought this apartment for $2 million, their two worlds blended almost seamlessly.

The only sound is the ticking of the Early American clocks that rest on shelves and hang on walls, along with the chimes that mark the hour.

Wandering through these high-ceilinged spaces, with their silky marble floors and ornate working fireplaces and gleaming gold mirrors, it is easy to channel past lives. In these luxuriously furnished rooms, which flow gracefully from one to another and are lighted by heavy chandeliers, it’s easy to picture the elite New York family that occupied this Georgian-style town house three-quarters of a century earlier.

The house was built in 1929 for a prominent financier named George Whitney and his wife, Martha, and is one of three splendid buildings on this block east of Park Avenue. Largely because Ms. Warren has the eye and sensibility of an artist, the couple’s apartment has the look of a lushly appointed house museum. And her passion for buying interesting and beautiful things, a passion that manifested itself in her teens, has served her well.

“There are three thrift shops between the apartment and my studio,” said Ms. Warren, who works in a space on Third Avenue and 84th Street. “I’m in and out of them all the time, and I rarely go home empty-handed. My husband wants to kill me sometimes.”

At the time of the couple’s marriage in 1997, a second one for both, Mr. Geist was living in a one-bedroom apartment on Park Avenue and 85th Street. Ms. Warren was ensconced in a Classic 6 on East 74th Street that brimmed with several decades’ worth of acquisitions from around the globe. Yet in 2000, when the couple bought this six-room apartment for $2 million, their two worlds blended almost seamlessly.

From Mr. Geist came a trove of Early Americana, much of which he had grown up with in Connecticut. From Ms. Warren came a wildly eclectic assortment of items, many of them French (the couple spend half the year in St.-Rémy-de-Provence), along with her large abstract canvases and drawings.

“Somehow it all worked out, and everything came together well in this apartment,” Ms. Warren said. “Even the rugs, which had been gotten for other spaces, fit perfectly.”

Homes are furnished with stories as much as with chairs and end tables, and some of the stories about the contents of this apartment have the charm of novellas.

One involves the coffee table in the living room, a hefty item that resembles a gargantuan leather-bound book and contains an almost-invisible secret drawer. Ms. Warren found the table at the Sloan-Kettering thrift shop, a regular stop along her route.

One day not long afterward, when a pair of visiting friends were ushered into the living room, they stopped short and stared at the table with amazement. “It turned out that the table had been a wedding present to them and they had given it away,” Ms. Warren said. “They were understandably quite shocked to see it in our apartment.”

Ms. Warren also likes to recount the story of the 18th-century armoire she saw one evening in another thrift shop. The proprietor had just moved in, and the armoire lay in pieces in a corner, waiting to be assembled.

“I walked in, gave him a charge card, and bought it for $800,” Ms. Warren recalled. “It was just an amazing piece of luck.”

At the couple’s home in France, a highlight of the social season is their annual Boxing Day party, complete with a gypsy band from Arles. The dinner parties that take place in this apartment are similarly festive affairs. Guests are seated around a 10-foot-long Venetian dining room table, a mirrored slab so weighty it had to be hoisted up through a window. They dine on the blue and orange Imari porcelain that is kept in the cabinet in one corner, or on the Limoges china stored in the lavishly equipped kitchen. On the walls behind them hang Ms. Warren’s series of cypress trees, swirling masses of reds, blacks and grays executed with paint and torn paper. The room is illuminated by a chandelier garlanded with brass leaves.

As is the case with so many items in this apartment, Ms. Warren found the chandelier in a little shop in Paris.

“It used to have real candles,” she said. “But they were such a pain in the neck. The air blew the wax, and it would fall on people’s heads.”

Off the dining room is a library, with an old-fashioned library ladder and leather-bound books tucked into built-in bookshelves. Nearby is Mr. Geist’s study, which is furnished with Piranesi prints, an 18th-century mahogany highboy and a leopard-skin print rug from Edward Fields, a maker of bespoke carpets. There is also a wooden bird cage, “but no birds,” Ms. Warren said. “It would be too messy.”

When it is warm, the couple and their friends sometimes adjourn to a small terrace that was created out of an airshaft. Ivy climbs up wrought-iron arches, and classical statuary and containers of boxwood nestle in corners.

In the evening, the terrace is lighted by candles. Close your eyes, and the world of George Whitney isn’t far away.

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