Sometimes the most unassuming elements make a lasting decorating impact. A case in point was a library ladder I literally bumped into following a luncheon at a breathtaking apartment in New York City.

A sparsely furnished environment of vaporous colors—pale blues, smoky lilacs, grayed whites—it is one of the most captivating private interiors in the city, home to one of America’s most intelligent and stylish women and her distinguished husband. The atmosphere, one fellow admirer declared, is like living in a cloud (I wish I’d thought of that). The object that held my eye was unexpectedly humble, positioned in a light-filled library alongside a bookcase filled with vellum-covered scrapbooks: a simple wood step stool, the kind of short ladder that costs around $25 in a neighborhood hardware store. Its unfinished pine frame and silvery metal fittings, however, had been thoroughly sponged with biscuit-color paint to blend with the walls and the bookcases.

“I needed a ladder to reach the upper shelves but didn’t need anything fancy,” my hostess explained. “I asked the workmen installing my bookcases where I could buy a stool like the one they were using, and they just gave it to me. It was spattered with all different colors of paint, so I just had it sanded and repainted.”

The step stool that resulted is a simple and elegant solution. Great design is like that sometimes—nothing special upgraded with élan.

Mitchell Owens
Editor at Large, ELLE DECOR