This apartment allows the past and present to become explicit in the living and dining area, where an original baseboard segues abruptly into a quarter-inch reveal that lifts the walls off the floor. A modern touch is found in the newly reclaimed oak floorboards placed in a herringbone pattern and finished in natural oil. The bathroom's hardware of unlacquered brass is set against Carrara marble. This home finds beauty and luxury in simplicity, at peace with both history and the present.

Founded in 1996 by Brian Messana and Toby O’Rorke in New York City, Messana O’Rorke is renowned for crafting spaces of sublime restraint and ethereal beauty. Their process utilizes a rigorously thoughtful palette of materials orchestrated in an architectural language of distilled boxes, blocks, and containers that emphasize the qualities of space itself rather than the things that fill it. The apparent simplicity and serenity of Messana O’Rorke’s designs belie the astonishing richness and variety of the experiences they nurture. The architects’ projects span a wide spectrum of residential and commercial assignments in multiple geographies—city, suburb, mountain, desert, ocean. Yet even as they adapt their fundamental design vocabulary to address differences in program and context, Messana O’Rorke’s signature remains unmistakable in the ways they carve space and light. Their designs simultaneously foster both contemplation and invigoration, repose and action. There is no straining for theatrical effect, no tortured architectural calisthenics, simply a search for order, clarity, and beauty.