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Self-Help. Singer Pat Suzuki and her husband. Fashion Photographer Mark Shaw, decorated their own 5½-room rental apartment on East 30th Street in Kips Bay, one of Manhattan's better-designed (by I.M. Pei) new buildings. Side by side with antiques that they picked up on foreign travels, the couple have put such odds and ends as a polarbear rug, a $10 coffee table and a butcher's table (in the dining room). To help soften the chilling effect of a lot of glass, including Shaw's mercury glass collection. Pat Suzuki introduced warm fabric colors, contemporary Spanish chests and floor pillows, and picked up a few Japanese items, e.g., candlesticks. Says she: "They were probably cheaper at Lord & Taylor's than we could have gotten them for in Japan." The Built-in Look. The problem for Author-Editor (Doubleday) Margaret Cousins was how to set up a four-room apartment on East 63rd Street in such a way that she could live with her multitude of books and some favorite furnishings saved from the big Westchester home that she sold. Decorator William Pahlmann (see below) built storage walls wherever he could find the space, gave the study-guest-room the famous Pahlmann tent treatment: the walls are covered with striped mustard-and-red cotton, which winds around to the window wall and folds into drapery, while the ceiling is covered with a light blue fabric and a scalloped border at the top.
Paradise of Color. Decorator Pahlmann describes his own place as a "paradise of color." Currently under sublease to J. Davis Danforth, a vice president of Curtis Publishing Co.. Pahlmann's nine-room apartment on Park Avenue is filled with items and ideas that could furnish a museum twice its size. He designed his own V'Soske area rug, has mixed Louis XV and XVI, 17th century English, :8th century Genoese and Venetian, Chinese tea paper, Portuguese rag rug. In Pahlmann's favorite manner, one small bedroom is tented with cotton in blue, red and gold stripes. The library has a door, concealed by bookshelves, that leads directly into this bedroom. The master bedroom, whose ceiling is overlaid with the Chinese tea paper, has a bedspread made from a Greek rug, and a headboard upholstered in mustard-colored leather.
It takes a heap of fussin' to make an apartment a home.