Manhattan Mystery Apartment

(Photo caption: When the correct keys are used, hidden drawers are revealed. Photo: Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Kyle says: "Steampunk aesthetics, Art, Craft, Rube Goldberg, Puzzle... nuff said. Your readers will enjoy the adventure designed for two kids living in a fifth Avenue Apartment (all designed in secret so that the clients never knew)."

Things are not as they seem in the 14th-floor apartment on upper Fifth Avenue. At first blush the family that occupies it looks to be very much of a type. The father, Steven B. Klinsky, 52, runs a private equity company; the mother, Maureen Sherry, 44, left her job as a managing director for Bear Stearns to raise their four young children (two boys and two girls); and the dog, LuLu, is a soulful Lab mix rescued from a pound in Louisiana.

They are living in a typical habitat for the sort of New Yorkers they appear to be: an enormous ’20s-era co-op with Central Park views (once part of a triplex built for the philanthropist Marjorie Merriweather Post), gutted to its steel beams and refitted with luxurious flourishes like 16th-century Belgian mantelpieces and custom furniture made from exotic woods with unpronounceable names.

But some of that furniture and some of those walls conceal secrets — messages, games and treasures — that make up a Rube Goldberg maze of systems and contraptions conceived by a young architectural designer named Eric Clough, whose ideas about space and domestic living derive more from Buckminster Fuller than Peter Marino.

The apartment even comes with its own book, part of which is a fictional narrative that recalls “The Da Vinci Code” (without the funky religion or buckets of blood) and “From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler,” the children’s classic by E. L. Konigsburg about a brother and a sister who run away to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and discover — and solve — a mystery surrounding a Renaissance sculpture. It has its own soundtrack, too, with contributions by Kate Fenner, a young Canadian singer and songwriter with a lusty, alternative, Joni Mitchell-ish sound, with whom Mr. Clough fell in love during the project.

It all began simply enough, Ms. Sherry said, when she and her husband bought the 4,200-square-foot apartment for $8.5 million in 2003.

“I just didn’t want it to be this cookie-cutter, Upper East Side, Fifth Avenue kind of place,” she said.

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[#1 posted by wagepeace , June 12, 2008 12:56 PM]

That is just awesome!! Loved the article Mark (as I always do), but just had to say something!! We can always use more Buckminster Fuller references on this blog!! Never before has their been such an adept analogy!! Thanks!

And I always wondered (without ever taking the thirty-two seconds it would have taken to find out) what his first name was and how weird it must be, if he would rather R. Buckminster Fuller!

[#2 posted by jimh , June 12, 2008 1:09 PM]

Want.

[#3 posted by Elysianartist , June 12, 2008 1:14 PM]

I submitted this earlier today and as soon as I hit "post" I knew someone would beat me to it.