Interior designer Luba Libarikian encouraged her client and close friend, Branka Khoury, to throw a party, but not to invite her. The four-bedroom West End Avenue apartment that Libarikian had been furnishing for Khoury and her family wasn’t yet finished, but Khoury and her husband, who love to entertain, just couldn’t wait any longer.
“They’d moved in before the dining table and other key furnishings arrived,” recalls Libarikian, “but they wanted to have a big party showing off the finished apartment. I suggested to Branka that she host a party with just two other couples—to have a dry run and get a sense of how the rooms flowed, and to familiarize herself with where things were. I knew she needed to get a feel for how people would circulate in the new space.”
The Khourys’ impromptu gathering was a success, and Libarikian was happy to hear about it—even if, at her own insistence, she wasn’t invited. Now that the apartment is finished, Branka Khoury proudly deems her friend and designer as the star of every party. “The vision for our home was very much Luba’s,” says Khoury, a pharmaceutical executive. “She was the leader, and we were her followers. I’m one of those people who can say that I know what I like and what I don’t like, but I don’t know how to create what I like.”
Fortunately, Libarikian knows her vivacious, party-loving client well, describing Khoury as “an extrovert in the best sense of the word—generous, welcoming, fun.” To play up Khoury’s vibrant personality, Libarikian employed color, starting with a single armless chair in the living room that’s half-upholstered in a Pierre Frey fabric suggesting the patterns and hues of an Oriental rug, primarily pink, claret, magenta, and blue. It’s intentionally positioned so that it’s the first piece of furniture anyone sees upon entering the room, and it spearheaded the design for the rest of the home, becoming “the reference we always came back to during the process.”
A Waldorf chandelier from Arteriors, Vaughan sconces, and a mirror from Currey & Company hang in the foyer. The Milling Road Genevieve console is from Baker.
Furnishing pieces in the living room include Wayne swivel chairs and an armless Lombard chair, all from Kravet, and a Ludlow sofa from Maiden Home. The maple and travertine cocktail table is from Lexington Home. The painting hanging above the sofa is Theresa Daddezio’s Foxtail, 2022 (oil on linen, 52 x 38 inches; courtesy of Theresa Daddezio and DC Moore Gallery).
Scalamandré’s Bloom in Delft Blue covers the walls in the dining room, which includes a Woodbridge table and chairs upholstered in a Fabricut velvet. The bar is a custom design by decorator Luba Libarikian.
The primary bedroom includes a feature wall covered in a Zoffany grass cloth and nightstands from Theodore Alexander.
The marble used for the primary bath’s wall and floor is from Artistic Tile and the shower fittings are from Waterworks.
In the daughter’s room, a Stark rug lends graphic contrast to walls painted in Benjamin Moore’s Pampas Grass and trim in Vintage Taupe. The quilt is from Ballard Designs.
It follows that Khoury is a big fan of all things pink and wears pink and magenta outfits to great effect, Libarikian says admiringly, and her daughter’s bedroom is accordingly kitted out in a similar palette, a veritable cocoon of soft pink.“We bathed the room in the color,” the designer comments, “but I didn’t want to make it babyish. I wanted her to be able to grow into the space.”
In the dining room, a glamorous blue floral Scalamandré wallpaper contrasts smartly with a solid-blue bar custom-designed by Libarikian. “Branka fell in love with the wall covering the minute she saw it,” Libarikian recounts, “and while we looked at probably 30 other patterns, we kept coming back to it.” For the primary bath, Libarikian chose a variety of marble slabs vigorously veined in similar blues and lilacs, their almost dizzying effect tempered by polka-dotted hexagonal tile on the floor and a solid white accent marble on the wall and the room’s vanity.
The airy, high-ceilinged foyer had been a selling point for Khoury when she and her husband were conducting their apartment search. “I was adamant about having a place where I didn’t walk directly into the living room—I wanted a real foyer, like you’d find in a house,” Khoury says. “And Luba made it into a room by adding paneling and ceiling molding.” The latter includes a medallion that encircles a starburst-like chandelier, incorporated “because the apartment had old crown moldings that had been painted over a million times,” Libarikian reports. “You couldn’t make out the profile of the carvings, so this detail honors the original prewar design intent.”
Mixing business and friendship, it often turns out, can be challenging, but with this project, all was harmonious. “When you work with someone who’s a friend and then you’re still friends, even closer friends, at the end, that indicates a real level of respect and professionalism,” raves Khoury. And now, much to her delight, Libarikian continues to be invited to every party the Khourys host.
