ENID WOODWARD’S toenails are painted blue, a color you don’t often see on a mature woman. The walls of her tiny Manhattan penthouse are even more unusual — a strong sky blue, with blocks of red.We are not talking pale colors here. This is color as an explosion of energy, color that could hurl you into the air if, by some magic power, color were given force: a comic-book blast of Superman blue and red.
It’s a bold choice, particularly since you cannot move from Ms. Woodward’s blue-and-red living room to, say, a bedroom painted a tranquil and self-effacing eggshell white. The living room is the bedroom is the dining room.
The apartment is one open space — and at 600 square feet, a very small space. And while many who live in small studios hide their beds in pull-down contraptions, Ms. Woodward does not. Her bamboo-backed four-poster stands large and proud, “a temple within a temple,” as she and her design team at D’Aquino Monaco call it.
“A friend of mine came in and said, ‘This is your bedroom, right?’ ” Ms. Woodward said. “She knew better, but she just couldn’t get her mind around it.”
She gestured with her hand at points about the room — the bed, the TV, the built-in desk. “I said, ‘No, this is my bedroom, this is my media room, this is my workroom.’ The nice thing about a house tour is you can do it standing in one place.”
Ms. Woodward is 57 years old. Her voice carries a touch of her native west Texas, though she has been in New York for more than 30 years. She was a founder of a dance company, Woodward Casarsa, and worked with it for the five years it existed in the early 1980s; she later worked as the on-tour physical therapist with the Alvin Ailey dance company for 10 years. She now has her own physical therapy office in Manhattan.
She is involved in spiritual studies, primarily Buddhism in a down-to-earth way: the advantage of cooking for people who are on a retreat in silence is that they can’t complain about the food, she said. She also said that when she and her husband of some 20-odd years divorced a few years ago, they used a mediator because they were determined that their marriage would have a “graceful end.”
Ms. Woodward and her former husband, a financier and real estate broker, lived in the same prewar, Upper West Side apartment house where she now lives, in a large two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment with a dining room. About 10 years ago, they bought the little apartment directly above them for $275,000. They planned to break through and turn the two into a duplex one day. When the marriage ended, Ms. Woodward, who loved the building and the neighborhood, got the little apartment.
It had a cramped, dark bedroom and a tiny, walled-off kitchen. But it also had a very large asset: a wraparound terrace that was nearly the same size as the living space. Access was through a narrow living room door, though, and the terrace was only visible from two small windows in the living room, a small mullioned window in the bedroom, and another small window in the walled-off kitchen.
Still, for Ms. Woodward, who had gotten into gardening when she lived for a time in Los Angeles, that terrace was a big draw. And she was not concerned about a small living space. What was important to her was that her home be a refuge, she said, where she could decompress and restore herself.
To create that refuge, she worked with Carl D’Aquino and Francine Monaco of D’Aquino Monaco, an architecture and design firm. She gave them a few pictures she had pulled out of magazines: a cottage in England where everything was gray except for intense blue shutters; a bath house in Istanbul; Moroccan tiles.
She realized later that the team had also taken note of what she was wearing: a poncho a friend had knitted for her in burnt orange, a color that was echoed in the Burmese pots and bowls she had about the house. They had also listened carefully when she told them about her frequent spiritual retreats.
“She’s a very spiritual person,” Mr. D’Aquino said. “She loved color, which we love to work with; she also loves to garden and to cook.”
Ms. Monaco added: “I don’t remember the three images clearly other than they added up to one word — creating a sanctuary. She also had a great connection with Buddhism, and within a lot of the imagery of the Hindu gods they often use this really rich, intense blue as a background.”
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