Space, Light, Bragging Rights

Good question. Maybe the idea was to keep celebrity-hounds from storming the open houses. In any event, upon examining the two-bedroom unit in a century-old building near 181st Street, the couple were quick to solve the mystery. Mr. Hoffman, himself an architect, was the first to pick up on the clues.

Noticing Frank Gehry’s distinctive curvy plywood chairs, he remembers thinking to himself, “This person has good taste.”

“Then we saw the Frank Gehry fish lamp,” Mr. Hoffman said, alluding to the architect’s signature lighting fixture, made in this instance of shards of shimmering white glass. “I didn’t know they even sold them. Finally I saw several sketches, and they gave it away.”

Mr. Gehry, the California-based architect celebrated for such creations as the new 76-story luxury residential tower at 8 Spruce Street, just south of City Hall, was indeed the guiding spirit behind this space. With the help of Gordon Kipping, who served as the local architect, Mr. Gehry had renovated the apartment a few years earlier for his daughter, and it had come on the market because she was moving to another neighborhood.

At the time Ms. Fox and Mr. Hoffman were looking, they were living in what he described as a “shabby-chic” rent-stabilized walk-up in the West Village. In terms of their needs, it had drawbacks.

The three flights of stairs presented problems for their aging 65-pound dog, Guinness. Ms. Fox, 43, who is food editor of La Cucina Italiana and the author of “A Bird in the Oven and Then Some” — “Bird,” as she calls it — works at home and needed more space to test recipes. Mr. Hoffman is a partner in dbA, a design and construction firm, and his main wish was for a place with an aesthetically pleasing layout.

In October 2005 the couple bought the apartment for $500,000, and in February 2006 they moved in. Three years later Guinness died, but Jasper Lee, a lab-and-coonhound puppy from Texas, joined the family last September.

Even before Mr. Gehry got his hands on the apartment, the space offered such beguiling features as crown moldings and an oversized bay window that faced a Juliet balcony. Other windows open onto a vista worthy of Edward Hopper — a patchwork of water towers, a wedge of the George Washington Bridge, and brick walls laced with fire escapes and topped with rusting television antennas. But it is the Gehry accents, notably the unusual cutouts in two of the walls, that give the apartment an almost sculptural quality and make it seem considerably more spacious than its 1,200 square feet.

The cutout on the wall separating the kitchen and the dining area has folding shutters in which glass panes are set in frames of Douglas fir, a favorite material of Mr. Gehry’s and one that he used in his early houses in California. The shutters make Ms. Fox feel, as she puts it, “like baking several pies and putting them in the ‘window’ to cool.”

The cutout in the wall between the dining area and the living room is even more ingenious, punctuated by five of the original studs that have been exposed and stand like mute soldiers, pockmarked with old nail holes.

Together, the two openings do a great deal to enhance the play of natural light in the apartment. “In the late afternoon,” Ms. Fox said, “these openings just put a glow on the whole space.” Her husband added: “Anyone else would have just left a big opening. But with these pass-throughs, Gehry turned the whole place into a light box, one in which different colors of light are juxtaposed. It’s awesome.”

As an architect, Mr. Hoffman also appreciates how Mr. Gehry used a limited repertoire of gestures to pack considerable aesthetic punch. “It’s simple and wonderful at the same time,” he said. “He has few architectural moves here, but they’re really strong. There’s creativity without being fancy.” Put another way: “There’s no swoony silver stuff. He knows when to rein it in.”

Even more modest design elements reveal the Gehry touch. The bookshelves are made of stacked Douglas fir plywood, the edges exposed to show the organic quality of the wood. Mr. Gehry kept the original elegant height of the doors, which are a foot taller than is commonplace today, and replaced their hearts with translucent white laminated glass panels. Like the pass-throughs, these shimmering panels help create the feeling of an open, airy space.

In terms of square footage, the kitchen is relatively small, especially for a professional cook. But it is also visually lush, with a rich indigo vinyl floor and matching laminate on the counters. Thanks to the generous amount of counter and storage space, Ms. Fox has been able to test thousands of recipes here and to cook extravagant feasts for up to 40 guests. And if she needs items like pigs’ ears and chicken with the feet still on, she can buy them at La Rosa, a neighborhood grocery.

Furnishings come from all over and include an old butterfly chair and matching footstool that Ms. Fox has been carting around since her college days and eventually reupholstered with black-and-white cowhide. In fact, chairs with back stories seem to be a motif.

One chair, bought by Mr. Hoffman in a secondhand store in Alabama, was recovered in a ’60s-era yellow fabric by Ms. Fox’s mother as an anniversary gift. “It’s classic Danish modern, and you can see the good bones,” Mr. Hoffman said. From the Berkshires comes a Danish version of a Cherner chair courtesy of Ms. Fox’s father, who, if he had his way, would bombard the couple with more seating. “He has something of a chair fetish,” his daughter explained. “I tell him, Dad, we don’t need more chairs. We need more closets.”