Tour a Totally Modernist Apartment in New York’s “Jenga Tower”

In 2018, an Instagram follower reached out to Parisian designer Emma Donnersberg with a minor request. Could Donnersberg help the former makeup artist source a dining room table for her young family’s Tribeca apartment?

The piece’s size was the first indicator this was no ordinary project. “It had to be large enough to seat a dinner party for 12,” Donnersberg says—practically Brobdingnagian by New York City standards.

Then came incontrovertible proof that Donnersberg was dealing with a major space: the table’s future setting, a glass-sheathed penthouse in the building known as the “Jenga Tower,” designed by the Pritzker Prize–winning firm Herzog and de Meuron. (Paul Reber handled the interior architecture of the apartment.)

“I knew right away it would have to be custom,” Donnersberg says of the table, given the proportions of its setting. Fortunately, she had an array of options to present. Since opening her first office in New York in 2007, Donnersberg has frequented design fairs around the globe and cultivated relationships with gallerists and artisans. (She added a second office in her hometown in 2009.)

The client viewed close to 500 possibilities with her before selecting a piece by Italian artist Francesco Perini. Gallery Fumi in London oversaw the commission. “[This] was one of the largest tables I had made to date,” Francesco Perini says of his Incontro marquetry work, which weds fine woods with inlays of metal and stone. “The [oak] top was meticulously cut by hand and inlaid with onyx, creating patterns that resemble the annual rings of trees.”

Donnersberg’s initial collaboration went so smoothly, she was soon tasked with designing the entire 6,000-square-foot space—a dizzying prospect for a Parisian who grew up among Gothic and Beaux Arts structures easily dwarfed by the Eiffel Tower.

“We don’t have places like this in Paris,” Donnersberg says. “It just doesn’t exist. The view…it’s a dream.”

It was also her only asset at first. The apartment itself held few inherent charms. “The space was a box,” Donnersberg says. “You had to bring a bit of sensuality to it.” To that end, Donnersberg introduced fluid, feminine lines, like the undulating living room sofa, clad in white wool, commissioned from a favorite French upholsterer (who keeps a little office in New York City). A sliver of banquette, also custom, and a Damien Langlois-Meurinne pendant soften an informal dining area nearby. Curved custom chairs, sofas, and sinks bend the rest of the geometric space into something far more voluptuous.

While Donnersberg, who favors neutrals, typically reaches for art to bring in dramatic accent hues, that wasn’t possible here. “Because of all the glass, there aren’t really walls to hang things,” she says, noting that, in this residence, “Manhattan is the work of art.”

At the client’s request, she enveloped the abundant cityscape—panoramic tableaux that evolve with the daylight, weather, and seasons—in a dappled cloudlike palette. “I was a little worried about all the light colors at first,” Donnersberg says, noting the young family now has four kids under the age of ten. “But we separated the space into two parts.”

Extensive ceramics, like the Katherine Glenday vases balanced on the lip of a range hood or the Georges Pelletier totem tucked into the primary suite, keep mostly spare rooms from feeling too austere, as do amusing touches like the shaggy teal Philip Arctander chair in the library or the mushroom-inspired side tables in the living room. (The latter were crafted by Donnersberg and are available at Maison Gerard in New York.)

“I feel so lucky,” she says of this stage of her career. “I get to design exactly what I want.”