Elegant Aerie Overlooking Central Park, Revived Milanese Sensibility

"We looked for a long, long time," says the owner of an an airy seventh-floor apartment on upper Central Park West of her search for a distinctive new home. "Everything we saw was the same—bland." That is, until they found this. The original layout was classic prewar, full of small rooms and with a flow that was decidedly last-century. Though the building was built in 1898, the space had been updated just once before, in the 1970s, and it hadn't been touched since. "The interiors were stunned into paralysis, nothing changed," says the owner, the publisher of a venerable literary magazine, who shares the apartment with her husband, a financier.