A Second-Honeymoon Apartment

Stepping into Pamela Scurry's apartment is like entering a garden patio.

Ms. Scurry, the owner of Pamela Scurry's Wicker Garden Design Studio, has filled every room of her home with flowers, ferns, and other plants. An interior designer specializing in baby rooms, she has also recently redone her duplex, which she shares with her husband, Richard Scurry.

"We were approaching our 30th anniversary and this was our honeymoon apartment. We decided we were going to live another 30 years so we wanted to look at the apartment with a fresh eye," Ms. Scurry said. "This is a magnificent place, but we were asked to host a couple of small dinners and so asked ourselves what we needed to do in order to make it come alive again. Hosting the dinners was a good excuse to relook at everything."

Ms. Scurry said the new look of the apartment is a stripped-down version of the old. The home has an antique flair, but she has made it feel casual by mixing the old furnishings with new ones.

The Scurrys' small bedroom is just off the second-floor landing. The antique French bed has been stripped of its white canopy to reveal the brass structure with a crown top. Ms. Scurry took white duck fabric off the walls and replaced it with an Osbourne and Little creamy white-and-pale-yellow striped wallpaper. "It's a friendly, cleaner look — just taking stuff away," Ms. Scurry said.

The most striking element of the master bedroom is that it opens up onto an original conservatory bathroom, which used to be part of the wrap-around terrace. The centerpiece is a large marble tub surrounded by plants and overlooking Upper Manhattan. "The tub has been here forever," Ms. Scurry said. "It was Richard's idea to put in an oval tub."

Twenty old-fashioned small radiators nearby were re-painted in gray when the house was renovated. "The concept was to make everything look old," Ms. Scurry said. "The apartment used to be all white."

The terrace, bursting with flowers and plants, features a panoramic view of the Central Park reservoir and much of the Upper West Side. Ms. Scurry installed new planter boxes for the flowers and painted the white cast-iron fence black and gold and the tables and chairs a dark green. "You want your home to have some color flow," she said. "Ours is blue, green, pink. What you are looking out on, you want to bring back in through the windows, so you never feel jolted from one space to the next. There is ivy out here and ivy inside."

As a designer, Ms. Scurry is best known for making wicker furniture popular both inside and outside. She started out as an antique wicker dealer in New York in the 1970s, and has wicker furniture in her living room and sprinkled throughout the Fifth Avenue duplex. "Oak and wicker were really hot in 1975," Ms. Scurry said.

The peach-colored, sunny living room displays a large plant stuffed in an antique Victorian wicker baby carriage and an original Dare white horse with pink trimming from a carousel Ms. Scurry rode in Nantucket when she was a young girl. A set of Heywood-Wakefield wicker chairs from Ms. Scurry's Madison Avenue store sit around a table.

The dining room is much dimmer, with a dark wooden highboy and antique wooden tables lined up against the deep red walls. Ms. Scurry replaced her mahogany wood Duncan Phyfe dining room table with a much longer reproduction of a ball and claw mahogany table. She kept her Chippendale chairs and added eight parson's chairs covered in skirt fabric by Stroheim and Romann. The new dining table is now set with candelabras, china, and, replacing the Scurrys' wedding silver, their anniversary silver.

An impressionist-style oil painting of a young girl holding a rose hangs over one of the dining room tables. Discussing the painting, bought at a studio in North Carolina, brings tears to Ms. Scurry's eyes. "I just love the painting, and just had to have it because it has one rose," Ms. Scurry said. "When I was growing up it was what my mom and I always shared — in my day, having one rose was significant." Ms. Scurry explained the rose's meaning: "Life is like a rose. No matter what life serves you, it's got some beautiful, beautiful petals but there are some thorns along the way."