Room of the Day: Cool Style for Manhattan’s Ice House

There’s such a thing as a trusted neighbor, but interior designer Damon Liss takes the cake.

When the couple who lived next to him decided to move, they asked Liss to find their new home. But even after he located this sprawling, loft-like condominium in Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood, his job wasn’t done. The couple then requested he work his magic to fulfill the potential of the home, located in a grand Romanesque revival building called the Ice House. (When the place was built in 1905, it was used to store ice harvested from the Hudson River to provide turn-of-the century New Yorkers with refrigeration.)

Liss brought on the architects at wunderground, and together they made the space polished and glamorous.

Long expanses of white shelves and elaborate molding had made the large, open living space feel claustrophobic and dated.


AFTER: It’s as if the home has shed a frumpy muumuu in favor of a sleek Armani ensemble. The fireplace has an elegant new stone mantel; the old pastel yellow walls are now sophisticated gray. “We replaced the cabinet doors and drawers with sleek touch-latch doors,” says wunderground’s Nancy Nienberg. “The effect is to make it read as a smooth wall.”

Liss added wallpaper to the backs of the shelves and selected a mirror that repeats the wallpaper’s circular pattern. Two Brazilian stools represent the juggling act he performed with the furniture: mixing formal with informal for a look that is part glam, part approachable and all class.


That rough-refined dynamic is present in the floor too. It’s made of humble reclaimed fence posts but is laid in a chevron pattern that’s more “to the manor born” than “down on the farm.” Only the knotty pine pattern betrays the floor’s country roots.

The ceiling is blessed with dramatic arches, which add a lot of chic character. “This is a construction you often see in Tribeca,” says Nienberg. “It’s called a terra-cotta arch.”


Because the room is so long, Liss divided it into two living spaces: formal and informal. The formal space is for gathering, and each chair has a personality so vivid and distinct, it’s as if interesting guests are permanently gathered around the fire.

The other side of the space has a comfortable sofa and chairs that give people a plush place from which to watch television. A new two-sided storage unit (one side holds audiovisual equipment; the other acts as a coat closet) was made more interesting with the addition of fabric panels.

A console and two lamps act as a visual divider between the spaces.

“The thing that’s interesting about this space is that it’s directly over the Holland Tunnel, but if you look out the windows, the vistas of trees make it seem like you are in a park,” says Liss. “Unless you looked down, you would never know.”

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