Acanthus Press of New York publishes some of the finest architecture books in the world, including lushly produced, copiously illustrated monographs on architects no other publisher seems to want to handle. This season Acanthus published Susan Hume Frazer’s gorgeous monograph “The Architecture of William Lawrence Bottomley,” on one of the great, yet under-sung, American architects of the 20th century. Cognoscenti equate Bottomley’s name with Virginia, where many of his finest houses stand, particularly in Richmond. Some may even presume Bottomley was a Virginian. In fact, he was a born-and-bred Manhattanite, and a Columbia University graduate. While he did not adorn New York with so many buildings as he did Richmond, he nonetheless left his mark on his native town, as a stroll through Turtle Bay shows.

On the north side of 48th and the south side of 49th streets, midblock between Second and Third avenues, stand 20 town houses collectively known as Turtle Bay Gardens. These were conventional brownstones when, in 1918, a woman named Charlotte Hunnewell Sorchan purchased them and hired the architects Edward C. Dean and William Lawrence Bottomley to renovate them. Renovation was all the rage in New York at the time. Frederick Sterner had recently renovated an old brick row house on East 19th Street into a winsome Mediterranean-fairyland concoction, and carriage houses and stables by the dozens were being transformed into quaint homes and artists’ studios. This period of what the historian John Lukacs calls the “breeze of beauty” in American life brought us garden-city-type developments such as Forest Hills Gardens, in Queens. But already densely developed environments, such as in Manhattan, suggested novel solutions. Dean and Bottomley stripped the houses of their dour façades, and gave them basement (or garden-level) front entrances, which were very fashionable at the time. The duo put light-colored, Regency-style façades on the 48th Street houses and slightly whimsical façades with exuberant Flemish gables on the 49th Street houses. These changes gave the homes handsome and cheerful street presences. Inside, the architects rearranged the rooms, moving the garden-level kitchens from the rear to the front, placing dining rooms before the rear gardens.

Their most outstanding gesture involved the backyards. Flying over New York’s row-house neighborhoods, one may think them parks. If the typical row-house backyard is meager, 20, 30, or 40 contiguous backyards represent a lot of green. What if builders or property owners made a portion of these into a common area — a private park or a promenade? That’s what Dean and Bottomley did at Turtle Bay Gardens, with a common path down the center of the block interior, ornamented with fountains and statuary. While most of us will never get to see these gardens, they are amply illustrated and shown in plan, in Ms. Frazer’s book. Clearly they represent an ideal in urban living.

In 1928 Bottomley replaced two brownstones at 116 and 118 E. 55th St., between Park and Lexington avenues, with a double-wide house for the businessman William Ziegler Jr. Bottomley possessed complete mastery of Georgian forms and details, and here the Flemish-bond brickwork, shutters, dormers, eyelid windows, multi-paned windows, string courses, brick lintels, doorway pediments, and more are superbly crafted and proportioned. Some wonderful neo-Georgian buildings went up in the 1920s, and this is one of them. Ms. Frazer’s book has several photos of the long-gone Bottomley-designed interiors.

Altogether different from either Turtle Bay Gardens or the Ziegler house is the classic apartment skyscraper stretching from 52nd to 53rd streets overlooking the F.D.R. Drive. Known as River House, the building, designed by Bottomley and credited to his firm, Bottomley, Wagner & White, rose between 1929 and 1932. It replaced cigar and furniture factories on the site just north of fast-gentrifying Beekman Place. Here the “breeze of beauty”— the easy, airy, light, bright, charming, and sometimes frolicsome forms of the new American architecture — found its way to the high-rise apartment, with Georgian details massed to evoke an Art Deco spirit.

Originally River House boasted its own East River dock for the yachtsmen of the River Club, housed within the building. The F.D.R. Drive, constructed in the late 1930s and early ’40s, took away the river connection, though the dock is illustrated in Ms. Frazer’s book. More exciting, the book provides a comprehensive description and pictorial tour of the River House apartment Bottomley designed for himself. Much of it, Ms. Frazer says, remains intact.

In architecture, interior decoration, popular song, women’s clothing, and prose style, the 1910s and 1920s freshened New York and America, with Bottomley one of the period’s form-givers. One only wishes he had built even more in his native city.