Josef Frank Comes to Park Avenue

Austrian-Swedish architect Josef Frank is our favorite kind of houseguest—energetic, warm and utterly original. He is always welcome at the party. Maybe that’s why his textiles, wallpapers and furniture show up so often in our projects. Despite their singular and bold nature, his pieces play surprisingly well with others, and that’s very much by design.

In the case of our Park Avenue Apartment project, Frank’s work doesn’t just make a cameo, as some playful aesthetic counterpoint; his ideology becomes a philosophical touchstone. Our clients, longtime Commune collaborators from Northern California, wanted a New York pied-à-terre that didn’t feel at all “Upper East Side.” Their love of layered Swedish interiors provided a compass – prioritizing warmth, authenticity and connection to the natural world. In our dream dinner party scenario, Josef Frank would be sitting at the head of the table. A Jewish architect, born in Austria, he fled to Sweden in the 1930’s where he became known for his prolific work for Svenskt Tenn. His Stockholm years shaped an approach that rejected “total design,” the Gesamtkunstwerk ideal of complete, controlled unity, in favor of something that centered humans and social life. He cheekily coined the term “Accidentism,” petitioning designers to leave room for spontaneity in their work.

To understand the quiet radicalism of Frank’s philosophy, it helps to remember the world he was working against. In Vienna in the 1930s, modernism had hardened into dogma –rational to the point of austerity, obsessed with purity and control. Adolf Loos declared ‘ornament’ as ‘crime.’ Frank, a Jewish architect and designer in a climate hostile to both his identity and his ideas, stood apart. His clients, often fellow outsiders, sought homes that referenced design from places and times separate from their increasingly inhospitable context. In response, Frank cultivated a pluralistic approach. He filled residences with pattern, color, and personal artifacts not as decoration, but as small acts of resistance. His layered interiors were a deliberate defiance of rigidity -- arguing that comfort, individuality, history and contradiction had a rightful place in modern life.

Frank has been described as a “big-hearted fanatic of precision,” which feels like a fair description of our approach as well. We resist sharp-edged dogmas, favoring spaces that are both crafted and casual. The Park Avenue apartment embodies this same spirit. Though every element is meticulously made, the overall result feels unforced and alive, shaped as much by chance and circumstance as by plan. Take the pair of long window spindle-backed benches crafted by George Maker of Sawyer Made in Vermont. One lines the wall in the living room; it’s fraternal twin anchors the dining room. They look like loose furnishings -- lightweight, unfussy and vernacular, their lightly oiled blond wood appears raw among the painted wall paneling and upholstery -- but they were in fact made specifically for each space, each one exquisitely constructed to last a lifetime. The benches had to be built inside the apartment as they were too long to fit in the 1927 building’s elevator or up the stairs. The result are pieces that are literally and metaphorically open-ended: permanent yet appearing improvised, refined yet spontaneous.

This duality is pure Josef Frank. He once wrote that “we should design our surroundings as if they originated by chance,” calling for an inclusive architecture that supports the changing rhythms of social life. The apartment’s benches operate in the same spirit. In the dining room, the bench resists obvious categorization. It’s not a banquette for dining nor a serving buffet, just a long seat awaiting some unplanned moment. In the living room, the same logic applies. The bench doesn’t directly engage with the other major furniture groupings around the space. At one end sits a small round pedestal table, positioned in the corner that offers the apartment’s best natural light and city views. Just one floor above, an identical table occupies the same corner, catching the same light. The repetition feels almost accidental, yet entirely poetic. Two benches, two tables, two perspectives -- a quiet conversation between spaces, a resonance across floors. There’s a kind of architectural rhyme happening, intentional yet serendipitous, like a verse that repeats but never in quite the same way.

This layering of intention and coincidence gives the home its warmth. Nothing feels too strict or overdetermined. Colors shift gently from room to room; painted finishes respond to the changing light –textiles mix eras and origins without hierarchy. Upstairs, the two guest bedrooms are aesthetically and temporally linked, both featuring Frank’s textiles and hand-blocked Mauny wallpapers from 1930’s France. Each room uses the same wallpaper print but the background colors vary. Acknowledging the differing lighting conditions in each space, the front room is a sunny yellow, while the back bedroom is drenched in Dutch blue. The result is an apartment that feels cohesive but collected—an environment that could only have come together through time, care, and a willingness to let the unexpected in.

Frank was forced out of Sweden during WWII and spent those years in exile in New York. He gave lectures on Accidentism at the New School while developing textiles inspired by Manhattan’s city grid and the motifs he discovered from wandering the galleries of the Met. Much like our clients, Frank might never have imagined Park Avenue as his ideal setting. But we hope he would have recognized his philosophies in this apartment; the way it welcomes life rather than choreographs it. He’s still here in spirit: in the bleached oak floors and simplified moldings, in the Swedish patterned rugs, in the way the light lands on the long benches that ask nothing and allow everything. As with any great guest, his presence lingers after he’s gone. The rooms feel better for it; less perfect, more alive.

Text by Ashley Takacs

Photography by Ethan Herrington

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Frank, Josef. “Akzidentismus.” *Form*, vol. 54, no. 6, 1958, pp. 161–166. Translated by Christopher Long. In Tano Bojankin, Christopher Long, and Iris Meder, editors, *Josef Frank: Schriften / Writings*, Metro Verlag, 2012, pp. 382–387.

Frank, Josef. “The House as Path and Place.” Der Baumeister, vol. 29, no. 8, Aug. 1931, pp. 316–323. Translated by Wilfried Wang In Tano Bojankin, Christopher Long, and Iris Meder, editors, Josef Frank: Schriften / Writings, Metro Verlag, 2012, pp. 198–209.

Svenskt Tenn. “Josef Frank.” Svenskt Tenn, Svenskt Tenn, https://www.svenskttenn.com/se/en/designers/josef-frank/. Accessed 4 Nov. 2025.

Svenskt Tenn. “Svenskt Tenn’s Interior Design Philosophy.” The Journal, Svenskt Tenn, https://www.svenskttenn.com/us/en/svenskt-tenn/interior-design-philosophy/. Accessed 4 Nov. 2025.

Svenskt Tenn. “Textile Manhattan Linen – Josef Frank.” Svenskt Tenn, https://www.svenskttenn.com/us/en/range/textile/fabric/textile-manhattan/100686/. Accessed 4 Nov. 2025.

Thun-Hohenstein, Christoph, Hermann Czech, and Sebastian Hackenschmidt, editors. Josef Frank – Against Design: Das Anti-Formalistische Werk des Architekten / The Architect’s Anti-Formalist Oeuvre. 2nd rev. ed., Birkhäuser, 2021.