The 36th Annual Kips Bay Decorator Show House, previously held in private New York City mansions and restored townhouses, takes a new tack when it opens today. Twenty-one top interior designers will wrestle with urban style as they transform six apartments in the Manhattan House, the landmark Modernist building on the Upper East Side.

Designed in 1952 by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Manhattan House now is being converted into a residential condominium. The decorator show house, where designers provide innovative solutions to such traditional apartment limitations as small spaces, low ceilings, and minimal storage, could be an inspiration for potential buyers of the condos. The show also is useful for apartment dwellers looking for good design ideas that do not depend on beautifully paneled walls and intricate architectural details.

“It’s a fresh idea for Kips Bay,” the chairman of the Kips Bay Designers’ Committee, Richard Ridge, said. “It’s exciting. The designers are starting with a blank canvas, no paneling or marble. It’s the way most people really live today.”

Mr. Ridge and his partner, Roderick Denault, said they welcomed the challenge of an unadorned space, transforming it into a small but comfortable living room where contemporary art provides bright splashes of color against silvery-blue walls and blue-and-white upholstery. Design tricks were subtle but effective, and the lack of molding was actually a benefit, Mr. Ridge said: “It would have lowered the ceiling. The room-wide cornice on the window wall actually raises the ceiling.”

The Kips Bay Show House is noted for spotlighting emerging decorating trends, and this year is no exception. Some fresh ideas to look for:

* The easiest way to wake up a tired interior is with bright color, and this year’s most popular shades seem to be orange and turquoise. Geoffrey Bradfield chose lacquered orange walls for his “Art Dealer’s Bachelor Pad,” emphasizing the hue with an orange globe chandelier, orange suede dining chairs, and an orange bed for the dog. Sara Bengur’s colorful dining room features vine-stenciled tangerine walls and brightly patterned pillows on a curved turquoise banquette. In Larry Laslo’s penthouse apartment, turquoise walls lead the way into the master bedroom, where a turquoise silk headboard takes center stage. Elsewhere, Ellen Ward Scarborough and Madeline Ward Roth’s “Jewel Box” bedroom includes a scallop-edged turquoise corduroy bedcover and tasseled window treatment. The designers also painted an early 20th century bombe chest turquoise, outlining the drawers with white stripes.

* To make the most of small spaces, a number of decorators added distinctive touches to the ceiling. The “fifth wall” in Larry Laslo’s penthouse bedroom twinkles with crystals that were sewn onto rag paper. “They catch the light like fireflies,” he said. The sky blue ceiling of Jennifer Carpenter’s children’s bedroom is filled with small white model airplanes fluttering in the breeze, while the eye-catching malachite ceiling installed by Kondylis Design is actually a decoupage of color copies of the real thing. Overhead art also includes a celestial evocation on a shaped canvas that Andrew Edward Kepler suspended from the ceiling above a dining table to help define the space in the three-part Scholar’s Study and Sitting Room.

* Texture is another way of adding visual interest to a space, and there is plenty of grass cloth and sisal and contrasting surfaces, such as a smooth black leather club chair with a faux pony-skin cushion. Another of the more interesting effects is the espresso-colored corrugated wallpaper in Jeffrey Lincoln’s study.

More than in past years, a sense of fun and lighthearted practicality, even in the midst of serious, art-filled spaces, pervades the rooms. It’s an idea well worth adapting. The effect of the quilted pineapple headboard in Ms. Scarborough and Ms. Roth’s bedroom, and the glass chandelier in the shape of a fish spine hanging above the white lacquer dining table in the kitchen inspired by Daniel Boulud and designed by Rita-Luisa Garces for Bilotta Kitchens, is cheerful.

In another room, White Webb chose to cover the walls of a bed alcove with an intriguing mosaic of tin can lids in a mix of shapes and shades, while Charlotte Moss selected two casual Williams-Sonoma wicker sofas along with Louis XV caned-back chairs as the seating pieces in her room.

The show house, at 200 E. 66th St., runs through May 22. Admission, which supports the Kips Bay Boys and Girls Club after-school and enrichment programs for disadvantaged youth, is $30. For more information, go to www.kipsbay.org.