Interior designer Sandra Nunnerley brings together art and antiques to create harmony in her own apartment.

The overall effect of Sandra Nunnerley’s apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side is of mannered calm, balance, and self-assured chic.

After purchasing the fifth floor of a Beaux-Arts town house near Central Park, she gutted the apartments and turned the rear into her bedroom and study. By adding large French windows to bring in more light, she solved a structural issue common to many townhouses. With light only entering from front and back, the middle can be left feeling enclosed and dark.

Nunnerley knocked down walls in the high-ceilinged front apartment to create a perfectly square room: “There’s something restful about the clarity of those proportions,” she says. “I love to use simple things — I could take a beautiful piece of driftwood off the beach and put it next to a Giacometti sculpture. It’s the juxtaposition, the variety of things that you work with.”

Decorative accessories and modern art paintings compose the set, adding more color and consequently more light.