Edition: U.S. / Global

Bronfmans Tame a Town House

Published: September 23, 1999

GREETINGS exchanged at the door with a private security guard ricochet off the towering walls. A woman's heels scraped stone as she trots up two flights. An alarm is briefly triggered. It is move-in day, and the host, Clarissa Alcock Bronfman, sweeps into the living room to greet her first visitor in the lean, modern house she and her husband, Edgar Bronfman Jr., the chief executive of the Seagram Company, have just built for themselves.

The landmarked facade of their East Side town house has a neoclassical restraint Edith Wharton would have loved. But step inside, and you forget the past: Where wood once reigned, the vestibule is now paneled in waxed sheets of steel a warm shade of bronze. Two steps up, a steel and glass door swings open to a sun-filled two-and-a-half-story atrium court, replacing the old decorator-done parlor and as foreign to a hard-core Manhattanite as Oz was to Dorothy.

It's not a loft, the fashion these days for nearly all residential renovations. Nor is it a typical town house, dark and cloistered. The court contains a striking skylight and little else: there are broad limestone steps flanked by two wide ledges holding a larger-than-life-size Nigerian fertility statue and an artist's carved spheres of polished roots.

The living room is almost as spare, dominated by a Corbusier chaise beneath a monumental Roberto Matta painting. ''I don't want any more things in here -- I want it to be about the architecture,'' Ms. Bronfman, 33, said, adding with a sporting sense of challenge, ''I'll just figure out another way to make it more intimate.''

Just how easy it will be to feel at home under the eyes of a private guard and a house manager who materializes with a cell phone clipped to his belt (the millennium edition of the bygone butler and the bell cord) is still unresolved. But Ms. Bronfman is trying. When the major-domo proffered bottled water, she uncapped it and swigged. Their architect, Peter Rose, tried, too: at the urging of Ms. Bronfman, who is Venezuelan, he removed the core of the house to create a courtyard ''piazza'' that echoes the leisurely comings and goings of Mediterranean life. ''Light means happiness,'' she had said. ''Give me a court in the middle, in honor of my Latin upbringing.''

For Mr. Rose, it was a chance to break out of the stuffy hierarchy of a grandiose parlor floor and a layout in which family members are removed from one another's view. ''The model of the town house, for all its aspirations, is uncomfortable,'' said Mr. Rose, 56, who tries to capture the magic of moving through unhindered spaces with constantly changing viewpoints. ''I never loved the stacked sixplex with its grand stair going up to something not very important. I wanted to create options and a momentum so that all the power isn't turned over to a living room that isn't used much.''

To accommodate this scrutiny-shy couple with three children who wanted an absolute division between public and private realms, Mr. Rose conceived a plan with the complexity of a Chinese puzzle. The lower three public rooms -- dining room, then living room and library -- lead off the soaring sky-lighted atrium court. And each room has a view of another across the court, and of the street or garden beyond. The library, which has an interior window and a balcony, is meant to be a pivotal in-between space where the family can spend time with close friends.

The skylight actually works as a kind of false ceiling. Visitors would hardly suspect that there are two and a half stories of bedrooms above, reached only if you know which white panel is a secret door to a network of back stairs and hallways.

The rooms above the skylight feel secluded as well as airy because the architect arranged them around a second courtyard open to the air. The children's playroom has a small terrace; the master bedroom has an inward-facing balcony.

Edgar Bronfman Jr.'s family has a reputation for bold architectural one-upmanship. It was his aunt, Phyllis Lambert, who commissioned Mies van der Rohe to design the Seagram Building in 1958, the paragon of a modern office tower. So why not reinvent the town house, too?

The rooms are surprisingly small for a house pushing upward of 15,000 square feet -- who ever heard of a master bedroom on the Upper East Side too small for anything but a bed, a fireplace and a bookcase? ''I'd be happy if there was only a bed,'' Mr. Bronfman said graciously (his wife happened to design theirs, a curvaceous wenge wood platform).

As one moves about the house, getting there is half the fun -- and the challenge. On the first of three landings, doors give way into the narrow dining room and backyard beyond, with four linden trees (a Weber barbecue parked beneath one) to block the neighbors' view.

The stairs continue climbing the wall, like a vine, to the average-size living room. On the last flight, to the library, the steps become narrower, with a four-inch gap between the tread and the wall. It could almost be a goat path in the Italian Alps. Mr. Bronfman loves the look; his wife worries about the safety of their three small children, but the architect recently added a plastic safety guard. (Attaching bungee cords to the children could work as well.)