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Game Rooms. Financier J. Daniel Weitzman started out with an eight-room, three-bath East Side co-op penthouse, and ended with three baths, four rooms and a striking living room that plays "background music to the view" of the East River and the United Nations buildings. The designer, Architect Paul Lester Wiener, ripped out walls to forge the big living room out of four of the original rooms, then used the space to set up a "game" of varying planes and forms and colors—purples, magentas, blues and greens. To bring the outside in, Wiener installed a pebble garden and a black marble shaft that echoes the shape of the U.N. headquarters. To hold the Weitzman collection of heavy, 3,000-year-old Egyptian stone fragments, he anchored a dividing wall in concrete.
Clasped Hands & Needlepoint. In the penthouse in the same East River building where the Jack Heinzes live, the elevator button is imbedded in a pair of carved, clasped hands. The penthouse apartment belongs to Actress iviary Martin and her Manager-Husband Richard Halliday, for whom the clasped-hands motif recalls their courtship days. Placed here and there in the apartment are hands of brass, porcelain, ivory and onyx; the theme is even repeated on the stationery of Halliday's Halmar Productions, Inc. Decorated chiefly by the Hallidays themselves, the seven-room duplex is hung with paintings by Mary Martin and such friends as Noel Coward, Beatrice Lillie and Janet Gaynor. is furnished more for comfort than for show. Highlights: a needlepoint rug, made during backstage waits by Mary in her South Pacific days, a shower with mirrored walls, an enclosed, almost closeted antique bed, which the maid found uncommonly hard to make up until she hit on the ideal solution. Says the enterprising maid: "I get into it." Country Place. David Kapp, president of Kapp Records, was a longtime suburbanite, and in giving up commuting, was a little uneasy about the austerities of vertical living in the city. So the Kapps commissioned Decorator Melanie Kahane to build some homey warmth into their new six-room co-op penthouse on East 57th Street. To avoid "the sterility of the average co-op," says Melanie, "I tried to suggest a country place in the city. By that I don't mean a fireplace with a spinning wheel in front of it. It's more a matter of creating an architecture which gives the impression of a home." One homey touch: Carolina pine paneling, scorched with a blowtorch, in the library.