The question of how to display fine and decorative art in a domestic setting shaped the design of the residence, though few involved knew of Frick’s wish that it should one day become a museum in the mold of Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Boston home or the Wallace Collection in London. Frick was exacting in his specifications for a “comfortable, well-arranged house, simple, in good taste, not ostentatious.” Prioritizing classical symmetry and refinement, he stayed vigilant for any hint of over-ornamentation by the architect Thomas Hastings and turned to the leading decorators of the day. The cultivated elegance of the interior scheme—a blend of oak-paneled English sensibility and 18th-century French charm, infused with American opulence—belies a process marked by competing egos, lavish spending, and Frick’s unwavering quest for perfection.

Sir Charles Carrick Allom, acclaimed for reviving the Victorian interiors at Buckingham Palace, was appointed to oversee the principal enfilade of public rooms on the first floor. Favoring a rich English-country-house character, he helped set the stage for Frick’s careful placement of old masters in areas like the Living Hall, where Holbein’s rival Thomases of Tudor England—Cromwell and More—hang in eternal enmity on either side of El Greco’s pink-robed St. Jerome. In the West Gallery, he installed carved Renaissance Italian cassoni and lush green-velvet wall coverings by the Lyon firm Prelle as a dramatic backdrop to paintings like Rembrandt’s 1658 Self-Portrait and the enigmatic Polish Rider.

Allom met his match in actress turned decorator Elsie de Wolfe. With the success of her best-selling 1913 manifesto, The House in Good Taste, she wasn’t shy in petitioning Frick directly for the commission, assuring him that “no mere man” possessed her flair for those delicate touches a lady’s quarters required. Much of the airy, sophisticated grace of the second floor—where she sought to assert creative control—is her doing. As a champion of “simplicity, suitability and proportion,” de Wolfe’s work featured Baroque flourishes, gilt furnishings, innovative alcove lighting, and a whimsical cerulean singerie ceiling by John Alden Twachtman, with its delightful assortment of frolicking monkeys in human garb.

Having transformed another Carrère and Hastings creation in 2001 (now the Neue Galerie), Annabelle Selldorf is no stranger to the challenges of renewing Gilded Age mansions, describing her work at the Frick as developing a design language that is a “good friend” to its period foundation. The latest additions, comprising 27,000 square feet of new construction, incorporate the same colored Italian marble and Indiana limestone as the existing mansion. The second floor, accessible to the public for the first time, invites fresh appreciation of the Fricks’ domestic sphere—including the meticulously restored Boucher Room in Adelaide Frick’s boudoir, complete with textiles woven from archival patterns. The East and West Galleries feature silk velvets woven by Prelle, the same studio commissioned by the Fricks.