The Upper East Side is a mecca for sensory delights,” says designer and collector Ellie Cullman,

The walls of Ellie Cullman's living room are glazed in a "Persian Blue" taken from the ground of her c. 1920 Tabriz carpet. Kenneth Noland, "Warm Reverie" (on left wall), 1962, acrylic on canvas.

who lives in a 1929 Park Avenue duplex and works out of an office on Madison Avenue. Active in Manhattan’s museum world, Cullman is a noted collector of Asian art, American folk art and 19th- and 20th-century American paintings by artists such as Martin Johnson Heade, William Michael Harnett, Milton Avery, Adolph Gottlieb, Edward Hopper and Helen Frankenthaler. She also ranks among a handful of designers knowledgeable enough to curate museum exhibitions. At the Museum of American Folk Art she was the curator for Andy Warhol’s “Folk and Funk” in 1977 and “Small Folk” in 1980.

Starting in 1984, Cullman and her late partner Hedi Kravis built a coterie of A-list clients, most of whom are fine-art and antiques collectors. Not surprisingly, Cullman frequents museums to mine them for insights she can translate into designs. “Every museum is a valuable reference, especially for ideas about historical styles, color, texture and surface,” she says. She finds the Neue Galerie one of the most exciting museums in New York for its collection of early 20th-century German and Austrian art and design, which she says is often overlooked in larger collections. Despite her interest in historical representation, Cullman does not create textbook period-perfect rooms. “When we started Cullman & Kravis, we were more concerned with historic appropriateness, but that’s not how our clients choose to live,” she says.

What her clients want are livable rooms, which Cullman designs with signature innovations, such as layered lighting and decorative wall painting. “My own elevator landing is stenciled in a pattern that was inspired by the brocade of a Japanese obi,” she says. Cullman is also known for her pairings of classic and contemporary artworks and furniture: In her apartment, she hung a 19th-century oil by John Frederick Peto, an American still-life painter, juxtaposed with a mid-20th-century target painting by Kenneth Noland.